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CIHM/ICMH 

Microfiche 

Series. 


CIHIVI/ICMH 
Collection  de 
microfiches. 


Canadian  Institute  for  Historical  iVIicroroproductions  /  Instltut  Canadian  de  microraproductions  historiquas 


Technical  and  Bibliographic  Notes/Notas  tachniquas  at  bibliographiquaf 


tat 


Tha  inatituta  has  attamptad  to  obtain  tha  bast 
original  copy  availabia  for  filming.  Faaturaa  of  thia 
copy  which  may  ba  bibliographically  uniqua, 
which  may  altar  any  of  tha  imagas  in  tha 
raproduction,  or  which  may  significantly  changa 
tha  usual  mathod  of  filming,  ara  chackad  balow. 


□    Colourad  covars/ 
Couvartura  da  coulaur 


I      I    Covars  damagad/ 


Couvartura  andommagda 


□   Covars  rastorad  and/or  laminatad/ 
Couvartura  rastaurte  at/ou  pellicula 

□   Covar  titia  missing/ 
La  titre  da  couvartura  manqua 

□   Colourad  maps/ 
Cartas  gAographiquas  an  coulaur 

□    Colourad  ink  (i.a.  othar  than  Mua  or  black)/ 
Encra  da  coulaur  (i.a.  autra  qua  blaua  ou  noira) 

□   Colourad  platas  and/or  illustrations/ 
Planchas  at/ou  illustrations  an  coulaur 

□    Bound  with  othar  material/ 
Rali6  avac  d'autres  documents 


n 


n 


D 


Tight  binding  may  causa  shadows  or  distortion 
along  interior  margin/ 

La  re  iiure  serr6e  peut  causer  de  I'ombre  ou  de  la 
distortion  la  long  da  la  marge  intArieure 

Blank  leaves  added  during  restoration  may 
appear  within  the  text.  Whenever  possible,  these 
have  been  omitted  from  filming/ 
11  se  peut  que  certainas  pages  blanches  ajouttea 
lore  d'une  restauration  apparaissant  dans  la  texte, 
mais,  lorsque  cela  Atait  possible,  ces  pages  n'ont 
pas  4tA  filmtes. 

Additional  comments:/ 
Commentairas  supplAmantairas: 


i^'lnstltut  a  microfilm^  la  meilleur  exemplaire 
,u'il  lui  a  It*  poaaibia  de  aa  procurer.  Lea  ditaiis 
de  cet  exemplaire  qui  sont  peut-Atre  uniques  du 
point  de  vue  bibliographique,  qui  peuvent  modifier 
une  image  reproduite.  ou  qui  peuvent  exiger  une 
modification  dans  la  mAthoda  normale  de  filmage 
aont  indiqute  ci-dessous. 


I — I   Coloured  pages/ 


Pagea  de  couleur 

Pages  damaged/ 
Pages  endommag6as 


I — I   Pages  damaged/ 

□   Pages  restored  and/or  laminated/ 
Pages  restaurtes  at/ou  palliculAes 

E   Pages  discoloured,  stained  or  foxed/ 
Pages  dAcolortes,  tachetAes  ou  piqu< 


piquAes 


□   Pages  detached/ 
Pages  d^tach^as 

EShowthrough/ 
Transparence 


D 


Transparence 

Quality  of  prir 

Quality  in4gale  de  I'impression 

Includes  supplementary  matarii 
Comprend  du  material  suppKmentaire 

Only  edition  available/ 
Seule  Mition  disponible 


I     I   Quality  of  print  varies/ 

j     I   Includes  supplementary  material/ 

I — I   Only  edition  available/ 


Pages  wholly  or  partially  obscured  by  errata 
slips,  tissues,  etc.,  have  been  ref timed  to 
ensure  the  best  possible  image/ 
Lea  pagea  totalement  ou  partiallement 
obscurcies  par  un  feuillet  d'errata,  une  pelure, 
etc.,  ont  At*  filmtes  A  nouveau  de  fapon  A 
obtanir  la  maiiieure  image  possible. 


Th< 
poi 
of 
filr 


Ori 
bai 
tht 
sio 
otii 
fin 
sioi 
or  I 


Th< 
shi 
Tl^ 
wh 

Ma 

dif 
em 
bat 

rigl 
req 


Thia  item  is  filmed  at  tha  reduction  ratio  checked  below/ 

Ce  document  eat  film*  au  taux  da  rMuction  indiqu*  ci-dessous. 

10X  14X  18X  22X 


12X 


ItX 


aox 


2BX 


aox 


24X 


am 


32X 


Th«  copy  fllm«d  htrv  I'  m  b««n  rsproduoMl  thanks 
ta  th«  g«n«rosity  of: 

Univtrtity  of  Alberta 
Edmonton 


Th«  imagM  appaaring  hara  ara  tha  baat  quality 
poasibia  oonaidaring  tha  condition  and  lagibiiity 
of  tha  originai  copy  and  in  Icaaping  with  tha  * 
fiiming  contract  spacif Icationa. 


Original  capias  in  printad  papar  covara  ara  fiimad 
baginning  with  tha  front  covar  and  anding  on 
tha  iaat  paga  with  a  printad  or  illuatratad  improa- 
sion.  or  tha  bacic  covar  whan  apprapriata.  All 
othar  original  copiaa  ara  fiimad  baginning  on  tha 
first  paga  with  a  printad  or  illuatratad  impras- 
sion.  and  anding  on  tha  Iaat  paga  with  a  printad 
or  illuatratad  impraaaion. 


Tha  Iaat  racordad  frama  on  aach  microficha 
shall  contain  tha  symbol  •■»' (moaning  "CON- 
TINUED"), or  tha  symbol  ▼  (moaning  "END"), 
whichavar  appliaa. 

IMapa.  platas.  charta.  ate.  may  ba  fiimad  at 
diffarant  raduction  ratioa.  Thoaa  too  larga  to  ba 
antiraly  included  in  ona  axpoaura  ara  fiimad 
baginning  In  tha  uppar  laft  hand  comar.  laft  to 
right  and  top  to  bottom,  aa  many  framaa  aa 
raquirad.  Tha  following  diagrams  iilustrata  tha 
mathod: 


1 

2 

3 

L'axampiaira  filmi  fut  raproduit  grica  A  la 
ginArosit*  da: 

University  of  Alberta 
Edmonton 


Las  imagas  suivsntas  ont  iti  rsproduitas  avac  le 
plus  grsnd  soin.  compta  tanu  do  la  condition  et 
da  la  nattat*  da  l'axampiaira  film*,  at  an 
conformitA  avac  las  conditions  du  contrat  da 
fllmaga. 

Laa  axamplairaa  originaux  dont  la  couvartura  Bn 
papiar  aat  imprimAa  sont  fiimAs  an  commandant 
par  la  pramiar  plat  at  9n  tarminant  soit  par  la 
darni4ra  paga  qui  comporta  una  ampreinta 
d'imprassion  ou  d'illustration.  soit  par  la  second 
plat,  salon  la  caa.  Tous  las  aut  as  axamplairas 
originaux  sont  filmis  an  comman9ant  par  ^i 
pramlAra  paga  qui  comporta  una  amprainta 
d'impraaaion  ou  d'illuatration  at  an  tarminant  par 
la  darniAra  paga  qui  comporta  una  talla 
amprainta. 

Un  daa  symbolaa  suivants  apparaitra  sur  la 
darniira  imaga  da  chaqua  microficha,  salon  la 
cas:  la  symboio  -^  signifia  "A  SUiVRE".  la 
symbols  ^  signifia  "FIN". 

Laa  cartas,  pianchss,  tableaux,  etc.,  peuvent  Atre 
filmic  k  dee  taux  da  rAductio  n  diff Grants. 
Lorsque  le  document  est  trop  grand  pour  dtre 
reproduit  en  un  soul  clichA,  ii  est  film*  A  partir 
da  Tangle  supArieur  geuche,  de  gauche  A  droite, 
et  de  haut  en  bas.  an  prenant  le  nombre 
d'imagea  nAcessaire.  Laa  diagrammes  suivants 
iliustrant  la  mithode. 


-'--'1 


1 

2 

3 

4 

5 

6 

i  / 


I     ' 


I 


BL 


THE   EVOLUTION   OF   THE    IDEA ' 
OF  GOD:    AN  INQUIRY  INTO 
THE   ORIGINS  OF  RELIGION 


A  H  X 


i  i 


I 


GRAMT  ALLEN 

Autker  «»/"  Phfsielopcal  Mithtti»r  "  Th*  Colour 
S*ns*,"  "  Forct  and  Entrfy,"  tic. 


NEW    YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1897 


Copjrrlgrht,  1897, 


BV 


HENRY  HOLT  &  CO. 


/ 


HOBBRT  DROMMOin,,  ■L.CTROTTPBR  AND  PR^TBt.  MRW  YORK. 


1  ! 


PREFACE. 


11 


Two  main  schools  of  religious  thinking  exist  in  our 
midst  at  the  present  day  :  the  school  of  humanists  and 
the  school  of  animists.     This  work  is  to  some  extent  an 
attempt  to  reconcile  them.     It  contains,  I  believe,  the  first 
extended  effort  that  has  yet  been  made  to  trace  the  genesis 
of  the  belief  in  a  God  from  its  earliest  origin  in  the  mind 
of  primitive  man  up  to  its  fullest  development  in  advanced 
and  etherealised  Christian  theology.    My  method  is  there- 
fore constructive,  not  destructive.    Instead  of  setting  out 
to  argue  away  or  demolish  a  deep-seated  and  ancestral 
element  m  our  complex  nature,  this  book  merely  posits 
for  Itself  the  psychological  question,  "  By  what  successive 
steps  did  men  come  to  frame  for  themselves  the  concep- 
tion of  a  deity  ?  "—or,  if  the  reader  so  prefers  it,  "  How 
did  we  arrive  at  our  knowledge  of  God  ?  "    It  seeks  pro- 
visionally to  answer  these  profound  and  important  ques- 
tions by  reference  to  the  earliest  beliefs  of  savages,  past 
or  present,  and  to  the  testimony  of  historical  documents 
and  ancient  monuments.     It  does  not  concern  itself  at 
al    with  the  validity  or  invalidity  of  the  ideas  in  them- 
selves ;  It  does  but  endeavour  to  show  how  inevitable  they 
were,  and  how  man's  relation  with  the  external  universe 
was  certain  a  priori  to  beget  them  as  of  necessity. 

In  so  vast  a  synthesis,  it  would  be  absurd  to  pretend 
at  the  present  day  that  one  approached  one's  subject  en- 
tirely de  novo.  Every  enquirer  must  needs  depend  much 
upon  the  various  researches  of  his  predecessors  in  variou*- 


in 


I 


IV 


PREFACE. 


parts  of  his  field  of  enquiry.  The  problem  before  us 
divides  itself  into  three  main  portions  :  Urst,  how  did  men 
come  to  believe  in  many  gods — the  origin  of  polytheism  ; 
second,  how,  by  elimination  of  most  of  these  gods,  did  cer- 
tain races  of  men  come  to  believe  in  one  single  supreme 
and  omnipotent  God — the  origin  of  monotheism  ;  third 
how,  having  arrived  at  that  concept,  did  the  most  ad- 
vanced races  and  civilisations  come  to  conceive  of  that 
God  as  Triune,  and  to  identify  one  of  his  Persons  with  a 
particular  divine  and  human  incarnation — the  origin  of 
Christianity.  In  considering  each  of  these  three  main 
problems  I  have  been  greatly  guided  and  assisted  by 
three  previous  enquirers  or  sets  of  enquirers. 

As  to  the  origin  of  polytheism,  I  have  adopted  in  the 
main  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  remarkable  ghost  theory, 
though  with  certain  important  modifications  and  ad- 
ditions. In  this  part  of  my  work  I  have  also  been  largely 
aided  by  materials  derived  from  Mr.  Dufi  Macdonald,  the 
able  author  of  A  fricana,  from  Mr.  Turner,  the  well-known 
Samoan  missionary,  and  from  several  other  writers,  sup- 
plemented as  they  are  by  my  own  researches  among  the 
works  of  explorers  and  ethnologists  in  general.  On  the 
whole,  I  have  here  accepted  the  theory  which  traces  the 
origin  of  the  belief  in  gods  to  primeval  ancestor-worship, 
or  rather  corpse-worship,  as  against  the  rival  theory  which 
traces  its  origin  to  a  supposed  primitive  animism. 

As  to  the  rise  of  monotheism,  I  have  been  influenced  in 
no  small  degree  by  Kuenen  and  the  Teutonic  school  of 
Old  Testament  criticism,  whose  ideas  have  been  supple- 
mented by  later  concepts  derived  from  Professor  Robert- 
son Smith  c  admirable  work.  The  Religion  of  the  Sem- 
ites. But  here,  on  the  whole,  the  central  explanation  I 
have  to  offer  is,  I  venture  to  think,  new  and  original :  the 
theory,  good  or  bad,  of  the  circumstances  which  led  to 
the  elevation  of  the  ethnical  Hebrew  God,  Jahweh,  above 
all  his  rivals,  and  his  final  recognition  as  the  only  true 
and  living  god,  is  my  own  and  no  one  else's. 


T 


PREFACE. 


As  to  the  origin  of  Christianity,  and  its  relations  to  the 
preceding  cults  of  corn  and  wine  gods,  I  have  been  guided 
to  a  great  extent  by  Mr.  J.  G.  Frazer  and  Mannhardt, 
though  I  do  not  suppose  that  either  the  living  or  the  dead 
anthropologist  would  wholly  acquiesce  in  the  use  I  have 
made  of  their  splendid  materials.  Mr.  Frazer,  the  author 
of  that  learned  work.  The  Golden  Bough,  has  profoundly  in- 
fluenced the  opinions  of  all  serious  workers  at  anthro- 
pology and  the  science  of  religion,  and  I  cannot  too  often 
acknowledge  the  deep  obligations  under  which  I  lie  to  his 
profound  and  able  treatises.  At  the  same  time,  I  have  so 
transformed  the  material  derived  from  him  and  from  Dr. 
Robertson  Smith  as  to  have  made  it  in  many  ways  practi- 
cally my  own  ;  and  I  have  supplemented  it  by  several  new 
examples  and  ideas,  suggested  in  the  course  of  my  own 
tolerably  w'de  reading. 

Throughout  the  book  as  a  whole,  I  also  owe  a  consider- 
able debt  to  Dr.  E.  B.  Tylor,  from  whom  I  have  bor- 
rowed much  valuable  matter  ;  to  Mr.  Sidney  Hartland's 
Legend  of  Perseus  ;  to  Mr.  Lawrence  Gomme,  who  has 
come  nearer  at  times  than  anyone  else  to  the  special  views 
and  theories  here  promulgated  ;  and  to  Mr.  William 
Simpson  of  the  Illustrated  London  News,  an  unobtrusive 
scholar  whose  excellent  monographs  on  The  Worship  of 
Death  and  kindred  subjects  have  never  yet  received  the 
attention  they  deserve,  at  the  hands  of  unprejudiced 
students  of  religion.  My  other  obligations,  to  Dr. 
Mommsen,  to  my  friends  Mr.  Edward  Clodd,  Professor 
John  Rhys,  and  Professor  York  Powell,  as  well  as  to 
numerous  travellers,  missionaries,  historians,  and  classi- 
cists, are  too  frequent  to  specify. 

Looking  at  the  subject  broadly,  I  would  presume  to  say 
once  more  that  my  general  conclusions  may  be  regarded 
as  representing  to  some  extent  a  reconciliation  between 
the  conflicting  schools  of  humanists  and  animists,  headed 
respectively  by  Mr.  Spencer  and  Mr.  Frazer,  though  with 
a  leaning  rather  to  the  former  than  the  latter. 


1^ 


vi 


PREFACE. 


At  the  same  time  it  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  look 
upon  my  book  as  in  any  sense  a  mere  eirenicon  or  com- 
promise. On  the  contrary,  it  is  in  every  part  a  new  and 
personal  work,  containing,  whatever  its  value,  a  fresh  and 
original  synthesis  of  the  subject.  I  would  venture  to 
point  out  as  especially  nov;l  the  two  following  points  : 
the  complete  demarcation  of  religion  from  mythology,  as 
practice  from  mere  explanatory  gloss  or  guesswork  ;  and 
the  important  share  assigned  in  the  genesis  of  most  ex- 
isting religious  systems  to  the  deliberate  manufacture  of 
gods  by  killing.  This  doctrine  of  the  manufactured  god, 
to  which  nearly  half  my  book  is  devoted,  seems  to  me  to 
be  a  notion  of  cardinal  value.  Among  other  new  ideas  of 
secondary  rank,  I  would  be  bold  enough  to  enumerate 
the  following :  the  establishment  of  three  successive 
stages  in  the  conception  of  the  Life  of  the  Dead,  which 
might  be  summed  up  as  Corpse-worship,  Ghost-worship, 
and  Shade-worship,  and  which  answer  to  the  three  stages 
of  preservation  or  mummification,  burial,  and  cremation  ; 
the  recognition  of  the  high  place  to  be  assigned  to  the 
safe-keeping  of  the  oracular  head  in  the  growth  of  idol- 
worship  ;  the  importance  attached  to  the  sacred  stone, 
the  sacred  stake,  and  the  sacred  tree,  and  the  provisional 
proof  of  their  close  connection  with  the  graves  of  the  dead ; 
the  entirely  new  conception  of  the  development  of  mono- 
theism among  the  Jews  from  the  exclusive  cult  of  the  jeal- 
ous god  ;  the  hypothesis  of  le  origin  of  cultivation  from 
tumulus-oflferings,  and  its  connection  with  the  growth  of 
gods  of  cultivation  ;  the  wide  expansion  given  to  the 
ancient  notion  of  the  divine-human  victim  ;  the  recog- 
nition of  the  world-wide  prevalence  of  the  five-day  festival 
of  the  corn  or  wine  god,  and  of  the  close  similarity  which 
marks  its  rites  throughout  all  the  continents,  including 
America  ;  the  suggested  evolution  of  the  god-eating  sac- 
raments of  lower  religions  from  the  cannibal  practice  of 
honorifically  eating  one's  dead  relations;*  and  the  evidence 

*  While  this  work  was  passing  through  the  press  a  similar  theory  has 


I 


T 


PREFACE.  vii 

of  the  wide  survival  of  primitive  corpse-worship  down 
to  our  own  times  in  civilised  Europe.  I  could  largely 
increase  this  rapid  list  of  what  I  believe  to  be  the  new  con- 
tributions here  made  to  the  philosophy  of  religious  evo- 
lution ;  but  I  purposely  refrain.  I  think  it  will  be  al- 
lowed that  if  even  a  few  of  these  ideas  turn  out  on  ex- 
amination to  be  both  new  and  true,  my  book  will  have 
succeeded  in  justifying  its  existence. 

I  put  forth  this  work  with  the  utmost  diffidence.  The 
harvest  is  vast  and  the  labourers  are  few.  I  have  been 
engaged  upon  collecting  and  comparing  materials  for 
more  than  twenty  years.  I  have  been  engaged  in  writing 
my  book  for  more  than  ten.  As  I  explain  in  the  last 
chapter,  the  present  first  sketch  of  the  conclusions  at  which 
I  have  at  last  arrived  is  little  more  than  provisional.  I 
desire  in  my  present  essay  merely  to  lay  down  the  lines 
of  the  general  theory  which  after  so  many  years  of  study 
I  incline  to  accept.  If  my  attempt  succeeds  in  attracting 
public  attention,  I  hope  to  follow  it  up  by  several  other 
volumes  in  which  the  main  opinions  or  suggestions  here 
set  forth  may  be  reinforced  and  expanded  by  copious  col- 
I  lections  of  evidence  and  illustrations.     If  it  fails  to  arouse 

public  attention,  however,  I  must  perforce  be  satisfied  with 
this  very  inadequate  preliminary  statement.  I  should 
also  like  to  add  here,  what  I  point  out  at  greater  length 
in  the  body  of  the  work,  that  I  do  not  hold  dogmatically 
to  all  or  to  a  single  one  of  the  ideas  I  have  now  expressed. 
They  are  merely  conceptions  forced  upon  my  mind  by 
the  present  state  of  the  evidence  ;  and  I  recognise  the 
fact  that  in  so  vast  and  varied  a  province,  where  almost 
encyclopaedic  knowledge  would  be  necessary  in  order  to 
enable  one  to  reach  a  decided  conclusion,  every  single 
one  or  all  together  of  these  conceptions  are  liable  to  be 
upset  by  further  research.     I  merely  say,  "  This  is  how 

been  propounded  by  Mr.  Flinders  Petrie  in  an  article  on  "  Eaten  with 
Honour,"  in  which  he  reviews  briefly  the  evidence  for  the  custom  in 
Egypt  and  elsewhere. 


Vlll 


PREUACE. 


the  matter  figures  itself  to  me  at  present,  on  the  strength 
of  the  facts  now  and  here  known  to  us." 

A  few  chapters  of  the  book  were  separately  published 
in  various  reviews  at  the  time  they  were  first  written. 
They  were  composed,  however,  from  the  outset,  as  parts 
of  this  book,  which  does  not  therefore  consist  of  discon- 
nected essays  thrown  into  line  in  an  artificial  unity.  Each 
occupies  the  precise  place  in  the  argument  for  which  it  was 
first  intended.  The  chapters  in  question  are  those  on 
"  Religion  and  Mythology,"  and  "  The  Life  of  the  Dead," 
contributed  under  the  titles  of  "  Practical  Religion  "  and 
"  Immortality  and  Resurrection  "  to  the  Fortnightly  Re- 
view ;  that  on  "  Sacred  Stones,"  contributed  under  the 
same  name  to  the  same  periodical  ;  and  that  on  "  The 
Gods  of  Egypt,"  which  originally  appeared  in  the  Univer- 
sal Review.  I  have  to  thank  the  proprietors  and  editors 
of  those  magazines  for  permission  to  print  them  in  their 
proper  place  here.  They  have  all  been  altered  and 
brought  up  as  far  as  I  could  bring  them  to  the  existing 
state  of  our  knowledge  with  regard  to  the  subjects  of 
which  they  treat. 

In  dealing  with  so  large  a  variety  of  materials,  drawn 
from  all  times  and  places,  races  and  languages,  it  would 
be  well-nigh  impossible  to  avoid  errors.  Such  as  my  own 
care  could  discover  I  have  of  course  corrected  :  for  the 
rest,  I  must  ask  on  this  ground  the  indulgence  of  those 
who  may  happen  to  note  them. 

I  have  endeavoured  to  write  without  favour  or  prejudice, 
animated  by  a  single  desire  to  discover  the  truth. 
Whether  I  have  succeeded  in  that  attempt  or  not,  I  trust 
my  book  may  be  received  in  the  same  spirit  in  which  it  has 
been  written, — a  spirit  of  earnest  anxiety  to  learn  all  that 
can  be  learnt  by  enquiry  and  investigation  of  man's  con- 
nection with  his  God,  in  the  past  and  the  present.  In 
this  hope  I  commit  it  to  the  kindly  consideration  of  that 
small  section  of  the  reading  public  which  takes  a  living 
interest  in  religious  questions. 


strength 


published 
written. 
,  as  parts 
if  discon- 
y.  Each 
Lch  it  was 
those  on 
>e  Dead," 
ion  "  and 
ghtly  Re- 
inder  the 
on  "The 
e  Univer- 
d  editors 
1  in  their 
*red  and 
!  existing 
ibjects  of 

Is,  drawn 
it  would 

5  my  own 
:  for  the 
of  those 

prejudice, 
le  truth. 
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lich  it  has 
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)n  of  that 
i  a  living 


CONTENTS. 


PAOB 

Prbpacb iii 

CHAPTim 

I.  Christianity  as  a  Religious  Standard i 

II.  Rblioion  AND  Mythology ao 

III.  The  Life  of  the  Dead 4a 

IV.  The  Origin  of  Gods 68 

V.  Sacred  Stones 93 

VI.  Sacred  Stakes 127 

VII.  Sacred  Trees 138 

VIII.  The  Gods  of  Egypt 154 

IX.  The  Gods  of  Israel 160 

X.  The  Rise  of  Monotheism 204 

XI.  Human  Gods 225 

XII.  The  Manufacture  op  Gods 247 

XIII.  Gods  of  Cultivation 27a 

XIV.  Corn- AND  Wine-Gods 301 

XV.  Sacrifice  and  Sacrament 3,  <* 

XVI.  The  Doctrine  of  THh  Atonement -» 

XVII.  The  World  before  Christ 362 

XVIII.  The  Growth  of  Christianity 378 

I'^XIX.  Survivals  in  Christendom 409 

XX.  Conclusion 434 

Index 439 

iz 


/^ 


> 


■ 


THE  EVOLUTION    OF  THE  IDEA  OF  GOD. 


CHAPTER  I . 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS   STANDARD. 

I  PROPOSE  in  this  work  to  trace  out  in  rough  outline 
the  evolution  of  the  idea  of  God  from  its  earliest  and 
crudest  beginnings  in  the  savage  mind  of  primitive  man 
to  that  highly  evolved  and  abstract  form  which  it  finally 
assumes  in  contemporary  philosophical  and  theological 
thinking. 

In  the  eyes  of  the  modern  evolutionary  enquirer  the 
interest  of  the  origin  and  history  of  this  widespread 
idea  is  mainly  psychological.  We  have  before  us  a  vast 
and  pervasive  group  of  human  opinions,  true  or  false, 
which  have  exercised  and  still  exercise  an  immense  in- 
fluence upon  the  development  of  mankind  and  of  civili- 
sation :  the  question  arises.  Why  did  human  beings  ever 
come  to  hold  these  opinions  at  all,  and  how  did  they 
arrive  at  them  ?  What  was  there  in  the  conditions  of 
early  man  which  led  him  to  frame  to  himself  such  ab- 
stract notions  of  one  or  more  great  supernatural  agents, 
of  whose  objective  existence  he  had  certainly  in  nature 
no  clear  or  obvious  evidence  ?  Regarding  the  problem 
in  this  light,  as  essentially  a  problem  of  the  processes  of 
the  human  mind,  I  set  aside  from  the  outset,  as  foreign 
to  my  purpose,  any  kind  of  enquiry  into  the  objective 
validity  of  any  one  among  the  religious  beliefs  thus  set 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


before  us  as  subject-matter.  The  question  whether 
there  may  be  a  God  or  gods,  and,  if  so,  what  may  be  his 
or  their  substance  and  attributes,  do  not  here  concern 
us.  All  we  have  to  do  in  our  present  capacity  is  to  ask 
ourselves  strictly,  What  first  suggested  to  the  mind  of 
man  the  notion  of  deity  in  the  abstract  at  all  ?  And 
how,  from  the  early  multiplicity  of  deities  which  we  find 
to  have  prevailed  in  all  primitive  times  among  all  human 
races,  did  the  conception  of  a  single  great  and  unlimited 
deity  first  take  its  rise  ?  In  other  words,  why  did  men 
ever  believe  there  were  gods  at  all,  and  why  from  many 
gods  did  they  arrive  at  one  ?  Why  from  polytheism 
have  the  most  advanced  nations  proceeded  to  mono- 
theism ? 

To  put  the  question  in  this  form  is  to  leave  entirely 
out  of  consideration  the  objective  reality  or  otherwise  of 
the  idea  itself.  To  analyse  the  origin  of  a  concept  is  not 
to  attack  the  validity  of  the  belief  it  encloses.  The  idea  of 
gravitation,  for  example,  arose  by  slow  degrees  n  human 
minds,  and  reached  at  last  its  final  expression  in  Newton's 
lav.  But  to  trace  the  steps  by  which  that  idea  was  gradu- 
ally reached  is  not  in  any  way  to  disprove  or  to  discredit 
it.  The  Christian  believer  may  similarly  hold  that  men 
arrived  by  natural  stages  at  the  knowledge  of  the  one  true 
God;  he  is  not  bound  to  reject  the  final  conception  as  false 
merely  because  of  the  steps  by  which  it  was  slowly  evolved. 
A  creative  God,  it  is  true,  might  prefer  to  make  a  sudden 
revelation  of  himself  to  some  chosen  body  of  men ;  but  an 
evolutionary  God,  we  may  well  believe,  might  prefer  in  his 
inscrutable  wisdom  to  reveal  his  own  existence  and  quali- 
ties to  his  creatures  by  means  of  the  same  slow  and  tenta- 
tive intellectual  gropings  as  those  by  which  he  revealed 
to  them  the  physical  truths  of  nature.  I  wish  my  enquiry, 
therefore,  to  be  regarded,  not  as  destructive,  but  as  recon- 
structive. It  only  attempts  to  recover  and  follow  out  the 
various  planes  in  the  evolution  of  the  idea  of  God,  rather 
than  to  cast  doubt  upon  the  truth  of  the  evolved  concept. 


■ 


t 


HUMAN  ORIGIN  OF  GODS.  - 

In  investigating  any  abstruse  and  difficult  subject,  it  is 
often  best  to  proceed  from  the  known  to  the  unknown, 
even  although  the  unknown  itself  may  happen  to  come 
first  in  the  order  of  nature  and  of  logical  development. 
For  this  reason,  it  may  be  advisable  to  begin  here  with 
a  brief  preliminary  examination  of  Christianity,  which  is 
not  only  the  most  familiar  of  all  religions  to  us  Christian 
nations,  but  also  the  best  known  in  its  origins  :  and  then 
to  show  how  far  we  may  safely  use  it  as  a  Standard  of 
Reference  in  explaining  the  less  obvious  and  certain  fea- 
tures of  earlier  or  collateral  cults. 
\  Christianity,  then,  viewed  as  a  religious  standard,  has 

this  clear  and  undeniable  advantage  over  almost  every 
other  known  form  of  faith— that  it  quite  frankly  and  con- 
fessedly sets  out  in  its  development  with  the  worship  of  a 
particular  Deified  Man. 

This  point  in  its  history  cannot,  I  think,  be  overrated 
in  importance,  because  in  that  single  indubitable  central 
fact  it  gives  us  the  key  to  much  that  is  cardinal  in  all  other 
religions  ;  every  one  of  which,  as  I  hope  hereafter  to  show, 
equally  springs,  directly  or  indirectly,  from  the  worship 
of  a  single  Deified  Man,  or  of  many  Deified  Men,  more 
or  less  etherealised. 

Whatever  else  may  be  said  about  the  origin  of  Chris- 
tianity, it  is  at  least  fairly  agreed  on  either  side,  both  by 
friends  and  foes,  that  this  great  religion  took  its  rise 
around  the  personality  of  a  certain  particular  Galilean 
teacher,  by  name  Jesus,  concerning  whom,  if  we  know 
anything  at  all  with  any  approach  to  certainty,  we  know  at 
least  that  he  was  a  man  of  the  people,  hung  on  a  cross  in 
Jerusalem  under  the  procuratorship  of  Caius  Pontius 
Pilatus.  That  kernel  of  fact— a  man,  and  his  death- 
Jesus  Christ  and  him  crucified— is  the  one  almost- un- 
doubted historical  nucleus  round  which  all  the  rest  of  a 
vast  European  and  Asiatic  system  of  thought  and  belief 
has  slowly  crystallised. 

Let  us  figure  clearly  to  ourselves  the  full  import  of  these 


4  CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 

truths.     A  Deified  Man  is  the  central  figure  in  the  faith  of 
Christendom. 

From  the  very  beginning,  however,  a  legend,  true  or 
false  (but  whose  truth  or  falsity  has  no  relation  whatever 
to  our  present  subject),  gathered  about  the  personality 
of  this  particular  Galilean  peasant  reformer.  Reverenced 
at  first  by  a  small  body  of  disciples  of  his  own  race  and 
caste,  he  grew  gradually  in  their  minds  into  a  divine  per- 
sonage, of  whom  strange  stories  were  told,  and  a  strange 
history  believed  by  a  group  of  ever-increasing  adherents 
in  all  parts  of  the  Graeco-Roman  Mediterranean  civilisa- 
tion. The  earliest  of  these  stories,  in  all  probability — cer- 
tainly the  one  to  which  most  importance  was  attached  by 
the  pioneers  of  the  faith — clustered  about  his  death  and  its 
immediate  sequence.  Jesus,  we  are  told,  was  crucified, 
dead,  and  buried.  But  at  the  end  of  three  days,  if  we  may 
credit  the  early  documents  of  our  Christian  faith,  his  body 
was  no  longer  to  be  found  in  the  sepulchre  where  it  had 
been  laid  by  friendly  hands  :  and  the  report  spread  abroad 
that  he  had  risen  again  from  the  dead,  and  lived  once 
more  a  somewhat  phantasmal  life  among  the  living  in  his 
province.  Supernatural  messengers  announced  his  resur- 
rection to  the  women  who  had  loved  him  :  he  was  seen 
in  the  flesh  from  time  to  time  for  very  short  periods  by  one 
or  other  among  the  faithful  who  still  revered  his  memory. 
At  last,  after  many  such  appearances,  more  or  less  fully 
described  in  the  crude  existing  narratives,  he  was  suddenly 
carried  up  to  the  sky  before  the  eyes  of  his  followers, 
where,  as  one  of  the  versions  authoritatively  remarks,  he 
was  "  received  into  heaven,  and  sat  on  the  right  hand  of 
God  " — that  is  to  say,  of  Jahweh,  the  ethnical  deity  of  the 
Hebrew  people. 

Such  in  its  kernel  was  the  original  Christian  doctrine 
as  handed  down  to  us  amid  a  mist  of  miracle,  in  four  or 
five  documents  of  doubtful  age  and  uncertain  authenticity. 
Even  this  central  idea  does  not  fully  appear  in  the  Pauline 
epistles,  believed  to  be  the  oldest  in  date  of  all  our  Chris- 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  CHRIST. 

tian  writings  :  it  first  takes  full  shape  in  the  somewhat 
later  Gospels  and  Acts  of  the  Apostles.     In  the  simplest 
and  perhaps  the  earliest  of  these  definite  accounts  we  are 
merely  told  the  story  of  the  death  and  resurrection,  the 
latter  fact  bemg  vouched  for  on  the  dubious  testimony  of 
a  young  man  clothed  in  a  long  white  garment,"  supple- 
mented (apparently  at  a  later  period)  by  subsequent  "ap- 
pearances    to  various  believers.     With  the  controversies 
which   have   raged   about   these   different   stories,   how- 
ever,  the  broad  anthropological  enquiry  into  the  evolu- 
tion of  God  has  no  concern.     It  is  enough  for  us  here  to 
admit,  what  the  evidence  probably  ^warrants  us  in  con- 
cluding, that  a  real  historical  man  of  the  name  of  Jesus 
did  once  exist  in  Lower  Syria,  and  that  his  disciples  at 
a  period  very  shortly  after  his  execution  believed  him 
to  have  actually  risen  from  the  dead,  and  in  due  time  to 
have  ascended  into  heaven. 

At  a  very  early  date,  too,  it  was  further  asserted  that 
Jesus  was  in  some  unnatural  or  supernatural  sense  "the 
son  of  God   —that  is  to  say,  once  more,  the  son  of  Jahweh, 
the  local  and  national  deity  of  the  Jewish  people.     In 
other  words,  his  worship  was  affiliated  upon  the  earlier 
historical  worship  of  the  people  in  whose  midst  he  lived 
and  from  whom  his  first  disciples  were  exclusively  gath- 
ered.    It  was  not,  as  we  shall  more  fully  see  hereafter 
a  revolutionary  or  purely  destructive  system.     It  based 
Itself  upon  the  common  conceptions  of  the  Semitic  com- 
munity.    The  handful  of  Jews  and  Galileans  who  accepted 
Jesus  as  a  divine  figure  did  not  think  it  necessary,  in 
adopting  him  as  a  god,  to  get  rid  of  their  own  precon- 
ceived religious  opinions.     They  believed  rather  in  his 
prior  existence,  as  a  part  of  Jahweh,  and  in  his  incarnation 
in  a  human  body  for  the  purpose  of  redemption.     And 
when  his  cult  spread  around  into  neighboring  countries 
(chiefly,  it  would  seem,  through  the  instrumentality  of 
one  Paul  of  Tarsus,  who  had  never  seen  him,  or  had  be- 
held him  only  in  what  is  vaguely  called  "  a  vision  ")  the 


6 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


cult  of  Jahweh  went  hand  in  hand  with  it,  so  that  a  sort 
of  modified  mystic  monotheism,  based  on  Judaism,  be- 
came the  early  creed  of  the  new  cosmopolitan  Christian 
church. 

Other  legends,  of  a  sort  familiar  in  the  lives  of  the 
founders  of  creeds  and  churches  elsewhere,  grew  up  about 
the  life  of  the  Christian  leader  ;  or  at  any  rate,  incidents 
of  a  typical  kind  were  narrated  by  his  disciples  as  part  of 
his  history.  That  a  god  or  a  godlike  person  should  be 
born  of  a  woman  by  the  ordinary  physiological  processes 
of  humanity  seems  derogatory  to  his  dignity — perhaps 
fatal  to  his  godhead  :  *  therefore  it  was  asserted — we 
know  not  whether  truly  or  otherwise — that  the  founder 
of  Christianity,  by  some  mysterious  afflatus,  was  born  of 
a  virgin.  Though  described  at  times  as  the  son  of  one 
Joseph,  a  carpenter,  of  Nazareth,  and  of  Mary,  his  be- 
trothed wife,  he  was  also  regarded  in  an  alternative  way 
as  the  son  of  the  Hebrew  god  Jahweh,  just  as  Alexander, 
though  known  to  be  the  son  of  Philip,  was  also  considered 
to  be  the  oflfspring  of  Amon-Ra  or  Zeus  Ammon).  We 
are  told,  in  order  to  lessen  this  discrepancy  (on  the  slender 
authority  of  a  dream  of  Joseph's),  how  Jesus  was  miracu- 
lously conceived  by  the  Holy  Spirit  of  Jahweh  in  Mary's 
womb.  He  was  further  provided^  with  a  royal  pedigree 
from  the  house  of  David,  a(real  orjmythical  early  Hebrew 
king  ;  and  prophecies  from  the  Hebrew  sacred  books  were 
found  to  be  fulfilled  in  his  most  childish  adventure?  In  one 
of  the  existing  biographies,  commonly  ascribed  to  Luke, 
the  companion  of  Paul,  but  supposed  to  bear  traces  of 
much  later  authorship,  many  such  marvellous  stories  are 
recounted  of  his  infantile  adventures  :  and  in  all  our  docu- 
nients,  miracles  attest  his  supernataral  powers,  while  ap- 
peal is  constantly  made  to  the  fulfilment  of  supposed  pre- 
dictions (all  of  old  Hebrew  origin)  as  a  test  and  credential 
of  the  reality  of  his  divine  mission. 

*On  this  subject,  see  Mr.  Sidney  Hartland's  Legend  of  Peneus,  vol.  i, 
passim* 


IDENTIFICATION  WITH  THE  HEBREW  GOD.  7 

We  shall  see  hereafter  that  these  two  points — the  grad- 
ual growth  of  a  myth  or  legend,  and  affiliation  upon  earlier 
local  religious  ideas — are  common  features  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  gods  in  general,  and  of  the  God  of  monotheism 
in  particular.  In  almost  every  case  where  we  can  defi- 
nitely track  him  to  his  rise,  the  deity  thus  begins  with  a 
Deified  Man,  elevated  by  his  worshippers  to  divine  rank, 
and  provided  with  a  history  of  miraculous  incident,  often 
connected  with  the  personality  of  preexistent  deities. 

In  the  earlier  stages,  it  seems  pretty  clear  that  the  re- 
lations of  nascent  Christianity  to  Judaism  were  vague  and 
undefined  :  the  Christians  regarded  themselves  as  a  mere 
sect  of  the  Jews,  who  paid  special  reverence  to  a  particular 
dead  teacher,  now  raised  to  heaven  by  a  special  apotheosis 
of  a  kind  with  which  everyone  was  then  familiar.     But 
as  the  Christian  church  spread  to  other  lands,  by  the  great 
seaports,  it  became  on  the  one  hand  more  distinct  and 
exclusive,  while  on  the  other  hand  it  became  more  defi- 
nitely dogmatic  and  theological.     It  was  in   Eygpt,   it 
would  seem,  that  the  Christian  Pantheon  (if  I  may  be  al- 
lowed the  expression  in  the  case  of  a  religion  nominally 
monotheistic)   first   took   its   definite   Trinitarian   shape. 
Under  the  influence  of  the  old  Egyptian  love  for  Triads 
or  Trinities  of  gods,  a  sort  of  mystical  triune  deity  was 
at  last  erected  out  of  the  Hebrew  Jahweh  and  the  man 
Jesus,  with  the  aid  of  the  Holy  Spirit  or  Wisdom  of  Jah- 
weh, which  had  come  to  be  regarded  by  early  Christian 
minds  (under  the  influence  of  direct  divine  inspiration 
or  otherwise)  as  a  separate  and  coordinate  person  of  this 
composite    godhead.      How   far   the   familiar    Egyptian 
Trinity  of  Osiris,  Isis,  and  Horus  may  have  influenced 
the   conception   of   the    Christian   Trinity,   thus    finally 
made  up  of  Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost,  we  shall  discuss 
at  a  later  stage  of  our  enquiry  ;  for  the  present,  it  may 
suffice  to  point  out  that  the  Graeco-Egyptian  Athanasius 
was  the  great  upholder  of  the  definite  dogma  of  the 
Trinity  against  opposing  (heretical)  Christian  thinkers  ; 


8 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


and  that  the  hymn  or  so-called  creed  known  by  his  name 
(though  not  in  all  probability  of  his  own  composition) 
bears  the  impress  of  the  mystical  Egyptian  spirit,  tempered 
by  the  Alexandrian  Greek  delight  in  definiteness  and 
minuteness  of  philosophical  distinction. 

In  this  respect,  too,  we  shall  observe  in  the  sequel  that 
the  history  of  Christianity,  the  most  known  among  the 
religions,  was  exactly  parallel  to  that  of  earlier  and  ob- 
scurer creeds.  At  first,  the  relations  of  the  gods  to  one 
another  are  vague  and  undetermined  ;  their  pedigree  is 
often  confused  and  even  contradictory  ;  and  the  pantheon 
lacks  anything  like  due  hierarchical  system  or  subordina- 
tion of  persons.  But  as  time  goes  on,  and  questions  of 
theology  or  mythology  are  debated  among  the  priests  and 
other  interested  parties,  details  of  this  sort  get  settled  in 
the  form  of  rigid  dogmas,  while  subtle  distinctions  of  a 
philosophical  or  metaphysical  sort  tend  to  be  imported  by 
more  civilised  men  into  the  crude  primitive  faith.  The 
belief  that  began  with  frank  acceptance  of  Judaism,  plus 
a  personal  worship  of  the  Deified  Man,  Jesus,  crystallised 
at  last  into  the  Catholic  Faith  in  one  God,  of  three  persons, 
the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Koly  Ghost. 

Quibbles  are  even  made,  and  discussions  raised  at  last 
as  to  the  question  whether  Father  and  Son  are  "  of  one 
substance "  or  only  "  of  like  substance ";  whether  the 
Holy  Ghost  proceeds  from  the  Father  and  the  Son,  or 
from  the  Father  only  ;  and  so  on  ad  infinitum. 

It  was  largely  in  other  countries  than  Judaea,  and  es- 
pecially in  Gaul,  Rome,  and  Egypt,  too,  as  I  believe,  that 
symbolism  came  to  the  aid  of  mysticism  :  that  the  cross, 
the  tau,  the  labarum,  the  fish,  the  Alpha  and  Omega,  and 
all  the  other  early  Christian  emblems  were  evolved  and 
perfected  ;  and  that  the  beginnings  of  Christian  art  took 
their  first  definite  forms.  Such  forms  were  especially  to 
a  great  extent  evolved  in  the  Roman  catacombs.  Chris- 
tianity, being  a  universal,  not  a  local  or  national,  religion. 


GROWTH  OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  PANTHEON. 


has  adopted  in  its  course  many  diverse  elements  from 
most  varied  suurces. 

Originally,  it  would  seem,  the  Christian  pantheon  was 
almost  exclusively  filled  by  the  triune  God,  in  his  three 
developments  or  "  persons,"  as  thus  rigorously  conceived 
by  the  Alexandrian  intelligence.  But  from  a  very  early 
time,  if  not  from  the  first  dawn  of  the  Christian  cult,  it 
was  customary  to  reverence  the  remains  of  those  who  had 
suffered  for  the  faith,  and  perhaps  even  to  invoke  their 
aid  with  Christ  and  tb«»  Father.  The  Roman  branch  of  the 
church,  especially,  accustomed  to  the  Roman  ancestor- 
worship  and  the  Roman  reverence  for  the  Dii  Manes,  had 
its  chief  places  of  prayer  in  the  catacombs,  where  its  dead 
were  laid.  Thus  arose  the  practice  of  the  invocation  of 
saints,  at  whose  graves  or  relics  prayers  were  offered,  both 
to  the  supreme  deity  and  to  the  faithful  dead  themselves 
as  intercessors  with  Christ  and  the  Father.  The  early 
Christians,  accustomed  in  their  heathen  stage  to  pay  re- 
spect and  even  worship  to  the  spirits  of  their  deceased 
friends,  could  not  immediately  give  up  this  pious  custom 
after  their  conversion  to  the  new  creed,  and  so  grafted  it 
on  to  their  adopted  religion.  Thus  the  subsidiary  found- 
ers of  Christianity,  Paul,  Peter,  the  Apostles,  the  Evan- 
gelists, the  martyrs,  the  confessors,  came  to  form,  as  it 
were,  a  subsidiary  pantheon,  and  to  rank  to  some  extent 
almost  as  an  inferior  order  of  deities. 

Among  the  persons  who  thus  shared  in  the  honours  of 
the  new  faith,  the  mother  of  Jesus  early  assumed  a  peculiar 
prominence.  Goddesses  had  filled  a  very  large  part  in 
the  devotional  spirit  of  the  older  religions  :  it  was  but 
natural  that  the  devotees  of  Isis  and  Pasht,  of  Artemis  and 
Aphrodite,  should  look  for  some  corresponding  object  of 
feminine  worship  in  the  younger  faith.  The  Theotokos, 
the  mother  of  God,  the  blessed  Madonna,  soon  came  to 
possess  a  practical  importance  in  Christian  worship  scarcely 
inferior  to  that  enjoyed  by  the  persons  of  the  Trinity  them- 
selves— in   certain   southern   countries,   indeed,   actually 


lO        CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


superior  to  it.  The  Virgin  and  Child,  in  pictorial  repre- 
sentation, grew  to  be  the  favourite  subject  of  Christian 
art.  How  far  this  particular  development  of  the  Chris- 
tian spirit  had  its  origin  in  Egypt,  and  was  related  to  the 
well-known  Egyptian  figures  of  the  goddess  Isis  with  the 
child  Horus  in  her  lap,  is  a  question  which  may  demand 
consideration  in  some  future  treatise.  For  the  present, 
it  will  be  enough  to  call  attention  in  passing  to  the  fact 
that  in  this  secondary  rank  of  deities  or  semi-divine  per- 
sons, the  saints  and  martyrs,  all  alike,  from  the  Blessed 
Virgin  Mary  down  to  the  newest  canonised  among 
Roman  Catholic  prelates,  were  at  one  time  or  another 
Living  Men  and  Women.  In  other  words,  besides  the 
one  Deified  Man,  Jesus,  round  whom  the  entire  system  of 
Christianity  centres,  the  Church  now  worships  also  in  the 
second  degree  a  whole  host  of  minor  Dead  Men  and 
Women,  bishops,  priests,  virgins,  and  confessors. 

From  the  earliest  to  the  latest  ages  of  the  Church,  the 
complexity  thus  long  ago  introduced  into  her  practice  has 
gone  on  increasing  with  every  generation.  Nominally 
from  the  very  outset  a  monotheistic  religion,  Christianity 
gave  up  its  strict  monotheism  almost  at  the  first  start  by 
admitting  the  existence  of  three  persons  in  the  godhead, 
whom  it  vainly  endeavoured  to  unify  by  its  mystic  but  con- 
fessedly incomprehensible  Athanasian  dogma.  The  Ma- 
donna (with  the  Child)  rose  in  time  practically  to  the 
rank  of  an  independent  goddess  (in  all  but  esoteric  Ca- 
tholic theory)  :  while  St.  Sebastian,  St.  George,  St.  John 
Baptist,  St.  Catherine,  and  even  St.  Thomas  of  Canter- 
bury himself,  became  as  important  objects  of  worship  in 
certain  places  as  the  deity  in  person.  At  Milan,  for  ex- 
ample, San  Carlo  Borromeo,  at  Compostella,  Santiago, 
at  Venice,  St.  Mark,  usurped  to  a  great  extent  the  place 
of  the  original  God.  As  more  and  more  saints  died  in 
each  generation,  while  the  cult  of  the  older  saints  still 
lingered  on  everywhere  more  or  less  locally,  the  secondary 
pantheon  grew  ever  fuller  and  fuller.     Obscure  person- 


w 


TEMPLES  AND  PRIESTHOODS. 


II 


ages,  like  St.  Crispin  and  St.  Cosmas,  St.  Chad  and  St. 
Cuthbert  rose  to  the  rank  of  departmental  or  local  pa- 
trons, like  the  departmental  and  local  gods  of  earlier  re- 
ligions. Every  trade,  every  guild,  every  nation,  every 
province,  had  its  peculiar  saint.  And  at  the  same  time, 
the  theory  of  the  Church  underwent  a  constant  evolution. 
Creed  was  added  to  creed — Apostles',  Nicene,  Athanasian, 
and  so  forth,  each  embodying  some  new  and  often  subtle 
increment  to  the  whole  mass  of  accepted  dogma.  Council 
after  council  made  fresh  additions  of  articles  of  faith — the 
Unity  of  Substance,  the  Doctrine  of  the  Atonement,  the 
Immaculate  Conception,  the  Authority  of  the  Church,  the 
Infallibility  of  the  Pope  in  his  spiritual  capacity.  And  all 
these  also  are  well-known  incidents  of  every  evolvir.g  cult  : 
constant  increase  in  the  number  of  divine  beings  ;  con- 
stant refinements  in  the  articles  of  religion,  under  the  in- 
fluence of  priestly  or  scholastic  metaphysics. 

Two  or  three  other  points  must  still  be  noted  iii  this 
hasty  review  of  the  evolution  of  Christianity,  regarded  as 
a  standard  of  religion  ;  and  these  I  will  now  proceed  to 
consider  with  all  possible  brevity. 

In  the  matter  of  ceremonial  and  certain  other  important 
accessories  of  religion  it  must  frankly  be  admitted  that 
Christianity  rather  borrowed  from  the  older  cults  than 
underwent  a  natural  and  original  development  on  its  own 
account.  A  priesthood,  as  such,  does  not  seem  to  have 
formed  any  integral  or  necessary  part  of  the  earliest  Chris- 
tendom :  and  when  the  orders  of  bishops,  priests,  and 
deacons  were  introduced  into  the  new  creed,  the  idea 
seems  to  have  been  derived  rather  from  the  existing 
priesthoods  of  anterior  religions  than  from  any  organic 
connexion  with  the  central  facts  of  the  new  worship. 
From  the  very  nature  of  the  circumstances  this  would 
inevitably  result.  For  the  primitive  temple  (as  we  shall 
see  hereafter)  was  the  Dead  Man's  tomb  ;  the  altar  was  his 
gravestone  ;  and  the  priest  was  the  relative  or  represen- 
tative who  continued  for  him  the  customary  gifts  to  the 


T 


12 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


ghost  at  the  grave.  But  the  case  of  Jesus  differs  from 
almost  every  other  case  on  record  of  a  Deified  Man  in  this 
— that  his  body  seems  to  have  disappeared  at  an  early 
date  ;  and  that,  inasmuch  as  his  resurrection  and  ascen- 
sion into  heaven  were  made  the  corner-stone  of  the  new 
faith,  it  was  impossible  for  worship  of  his  remains  to  take 
the  same  form  as  had  been  taken  in  the  instances  of  al- 
most all  previously  deified  Dead  Persons.  Thus,  the  ma- 
terials out  of  which  the  Temple,  the  Altar,  Sacrifices, 
Priesthood,  are  usually  evolved  (as  we  shall  hereafter  see) 
were  here  to  a  very  large  extent  necessarily  wanting. 

Nevertheless,  so  essential  to  religion  in  the  minds  of  its 
followers  are  all  these  imposing  and  wonted  accessories 
that  our  cult  did  actually  manage  to  borrow  them  ready- 
made  from  the  great  religions  that  went  before  it,  and  to 
bring  them  into  some  sort  of  artificial  relation  with  its 
own  system.  You  cannot  revolutionize  the  human  mind 
at  one  blow.  The  pagans  had  been  accustomed  to  all 
these  ideas  as  integral  parts  of  religion  as  they  understood 
it  :  and  they  proceeded  as  Christians  to  accommodate 
them  by  side-issues  to  the  new  faith,  in  which  these  ele- 
ments had  no  such  natural  place  as  in  the  older  creeds. 
Not  only  did  sacred  places  arise  at  the  graves  or  places  of 
martyrdom  of  the  saints;  not  only  was  worship  performed 
beside  the  bones  of  the  holy  dead,  in  the  catacombs  and 
elsewhere  ;  but  even  a  mode  of  sacrifice  and  of  sacrificial 
communion  was  invented  in  the  mass, — a  somewhat  arti- 
ficial development  from  the  possibly  unsacerdotal  Agape- 
feasts  of  the  primitive  Christians.  Gradually,  churches 
gathered  around  the  relics  of  the  martyr  saints  :  and  in 
time  it  became  a  principle  of  usage  that  every  church  must 
contain  an  altar — made  of  stones  on  the  analogy  of  the 
old  sacred  stones  ;  containing  the  bones  or  other  relics 
of  a  saint,  like  all  earlier  shrines  ;  consecrated  by  the 
pounng  on  of  oil  after  the  antique  fashion  ;  and  devoted 
to  the  celebration  of  the  sacrifice  of  the  mass,  which  be- 
came by  degrees  more  and  more  expiatory  and  sacerdotal 


THE  SACRED  BOOKS. 


13 


in  character.  As  the  saints  increased  in  importance,  niew 
holy  places  sprang  up  around  their  bodies  ;  and  some  of 
these  holy  places,  containing  their  tombs,  became  centres 
of  pilgrimage  for  the  most  distant  parts  of  Christendom  ; 
as  did  also  in  particular  the  empty  tomb  of  Christ  him- 
self, the  Holy  Sepulchre  at  Jerusalem. 

The  growth  of  the  priesthood  kept  pace  with  the  growth 
of  ceremonial  in  general,  till  at  last  it  culminated  in  the 
mediaeval  papacy,  with  its  hierarchy  of  cardinals,  arch- 
bishops, bishops,  priests,  and  other  endless  functionaries. 
Vestments,  incense,  and  like  accompaniments  of  sacer- 
dotalism also  rapidly  gained  ground.  All  this,  too,  is  a 
common  trait  of  higher  religious  evolution  everywhere. 
So  likewise  are  fasting,  vigils,  and  the  ecstatic  condition. 
But  asceticism,  monasticism,  celibacy,  and  other  forms  of 
morbid  abstinence  are  peculiarly  rife  in  the  east,  and  found 
their  highest  expression  in  the  life  of  the  Syrian  and 
Egyptian  hermits. 

Lastly,  a  few  words  must  be  devoted  in  passing  to  the 
rise  and  development  of  the  Sacred  Books,  now  exces- 
sively venerated  in  North-western  Christendom.  These 
consisted  in  the  first  instance  of  genuine  or  spurious  let- 
ters of  the  apostles  to  the  various  local  churches  (the  so- 
called  Epistles),  some  of  which  would  no  doubt  be  pre- 
served with  considerable  reverence  ;  and  later  of  lives  or 
legends  of  Jesus  and  his  immediate  successors  (the  so- 
called  Gospels  and  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles).  Further- 
more, as  Christianity  adopted  from  Judaism  the  cult  of 
its  one  supreme  divine  figure,  now  no  longer  envisaged 
as  Jahweh,  the  national  deity  of  the  Hebrews,  but  as  a 
universal  cosmopolitan  God  and  Father,  it  followed  natu- 
rally that  the  sacred  books  of  the  Jewish  people,  the  litera- 
ture of  Jahweh-worship,  should  also  receive  considerable 
attention  at  the  hands  of  the  new  priesthood.  By  a  gra- 
dual process  of  selection  and  elimination,  the  canon  of 
scripture  was  evolved  from  these  heterogeneous  mate- 
rials :  the  historical  or  quasi-historical  and  prophetic  He- 


14 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


brew  tracts  were  adopted  by  the  Church,  with  a  few  ad- 
ditions of  later  date,  such  as  the  Book  of  Daniel,  under 
the  style  and  title  of  the  Old  Testament.  The  more  gen- 
erally accepted  lives  of  Christ,  again,  known  as  EvangelR 
or  Gospels  ;  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  ;  the  epistles  to  the 
churches  ;  and  that  curious  mystical  allego'-y  of  the 
Neronian  persecution  known  as  the  Apocalypse,  were 
chosen  out  of  the  mass  of  early  Christian  literature  to  form 
the  authoritative  collection  of  inspired  writing  which  we 
call  the  New  Testament.  The  importance  of  this  hetero- 
geneous anthology  of  works  belonging  to  all  ages  and 
systems,  but  confounded  together  in  popular  fancy  under 
the  name  of  the  Books,  or  more  recently  still  as  a  singular 
noun,  the  Bible,  grew  apace  with  the  growth  of  the 
Church  :  though  the  extreme  and  superstitions  adoration 
of  their  mere  verbal  contents  has  only  been  reached  in  the 
debased  and  reactionary  forms  of  Christianity  followed  at 
the  present  day  by  our  half-educated  English  and  Ameri- 
can Protestant  dissenters. 

From  this  very  brief  review  of  the  most  essential  factors 
in  the  development  of  the  Christian  religion  as  a  system, 
strung  loosely  together  with  a  single  eye  to  the  require- 
ments of  our  present  investigation,  it  will  be  obvious  at 
once  to  every  intelligent  reader  that  Christianity  cannot 
possibly  throw  for  us  any  direct  or  immediate  light  on  the 
problem  of  the  evolution  of  the  idea  of  God.  Not  only 
did  the  concept  of  a  god  and  gods  exist  full-fledged  long 
before  Christianity  took  its  rise  at  all,  but  also  the  purely 
monotheistic  conception  of  a  single  supreme  God,  the 
creator  and  upholder  of  all  things,  had  been  reached  in  all 
its  sublime  simplicity  by  the  Jewish  teachers  centuries  be- 
fore the  birth  of  the  man  Jesus.  Christianity  borrowed 
from  Judaism  this  magnificent  concept,  and,  humanly 
speaking,  proceeded  to  spoil  it  by  its  addition  of  the  Son 
and  the  Holy  Ghost,  who  mar  the  complete  unity  of  the 
grand  Hebrew  ideal.  Even  outside  Judaism,  the  self- 
same notion  had  already  been  arrived  at  in  a  certain  mys- 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  OTHER  CULTS.  15 

tical  form  as  the  "esoteric  doctrine"  of  the  Egyptian 
priesthood  ;  from  whom,  with  their  peculiar  views  as  to 
emanations  and  Triads,  the  Christian  dogmas  of  the  Trin- 
ity, the  Logos,  the  Incarnation,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  were 
m  large  part  borrowed.  The  Jews  of  Alexandria,  that 
eastern  London,  formed  the  connecting  link  between 
Egyptian  heathenism,  Hellenic  philosophy,  and  early 
Christianity  ;  and  their  half-philosophical,  half-rdigious 
ideas  may  be  found  permeating  the  first  writings  and  the 
first  systematic  thought  of  the  nascent  church.  In  none  of 
these  ways,  therefore,  can  we  regard  Christianity  as  afford- 
ing us  any  direct  or  immediate  guidance  in  our  search  for 
the  origin  and  evolution  of  the  concepts  of  many  gods, 
and  of  one  God  the  creator. 

Still,  in  a  certain  secondary  and  illustrative  sense,  I  think 
we  are  fully  justified  in  saying  that  the  history  of  Chris- 
tianity, the  religion  whose  beginnings  are  most  surely 
known  to  us,  forms  a  standard  of  reference  for  all  the 
other  religions  of  the  worid,  and  helps  us  indirectly  to  un- 
derstand and  explain  the  origin  and  evolution  of  these 
deepest  among  our  fundamental  spiritual  conceptions. 

Its  value  in  this  respect  may  best  be  understood  if  I 
point  out  briefly  in  two  contrasted  statements  the  points 
in  which  it  may  and  the  points  in  which  it  may  not  be 
fairiy  accepted  as  a  typical  religion. 

Let  us  begin  first  with  the  points  in  which  it  may. 
In  the  first  place,  Christianity  is  thoroughly  typical  in 
the  fact  that  beyond  all  doubt  its  most  central  divine  figure 
was  at  first,  by  common  consent  of  orthodox  and  heterodox 
alike,  nothing  other  than  a  particular  Deified  Man.  All 
else  that  has  been  asserted  about  this  particular  Man— that 
he  was  the  Son  of  God,  that  he  was  the  incarnation  of  the 
Logos,  that  he  existed  previously  from  all  eternity,  that  he 
sits  now  on  the  right  hand  of  the  Father— all  the  rest  of 
these  theological  stories  do  nothing  in  any  way  to  ob- 
scure the  plain  and  universally  admitted  historical  fact  that 
this  Divine  Person,  the  Very  God  of  Very  God,  being  of 


^■^ 


mmm 


mm 


wmmm 


i6 


CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


one  substance  with  the  Father,  begotten  of  the  Father 
before  all  worlds,  was  yet,  at  the  moment  when  we  first 
catch  a  glimpse  of  him  in  the  writings  of  his  followers,  a 
Man  recently  deceased,  respected,  reverenced,  and  per- 
haps worshipped  by  a  little  group  of  fellow-peasants  who 
had  once  known  him  as  Jesus,  the  son  of  the  carpenter. 
On  that  unassailable  Rock  of  solid  historical  fact  we  may 
well  be  content  to  found  our  argument  in  this  volume. 
Here  at  least  nobody  can  accuse  us  of  "  crude  and  gross 
Euhemerism."  Or  rather  the  crude  and  gross  Euhemer- 
ism  is  here  known  to  represent  the  solid  truth.  Jesus  and 
his  saints — Dominic,  Francis,  Catherine  of  Siena — are 
no  mere  verbal  myths,  no  allegorical  concepts,  no  personi- 
fications of  the  Sun,  the  Dawn,  the  Storm-cloud.  Leav- 
ing aside  for  the  present  from  our  purview  of  the  Faith 
that  one  element  of  the  older  supreme  God — the  Hebrew 
Jahweh, — whom  Christianity  borrowed  from  the  earlier 
Jewish  religion,  we  can  say  at  least  with  perfect  certainty 
that  every  single  member  of  the  Christian  pantheon — 
Jesus,  the  Madonna,  St.  John  Baptist,  St.  Peter,  the  A.pos- 
tles,  the  Evangelists — were,  just  as  much  as  San  Carlo 
Borromeo  or  St.  Thomas  of  Canterbury  or  St.  Theresa, 
Dead  Men  or  Women,  worshipped  after  their  death  with 
divine  or  quasi-divine  honours.  In  this  the  best-known 
of  all  human  religions,  the  one  that  has  grown  up  under 
the  full  eye  of  history,  the  one  whose  gods  and  saints  are 
most  distinctly  traceable,  every  object  of  worship,  save 
only  the  single  early  and  as  yet  unresolved  deity  of  the  He- 
brew cult,  whose  origin  is  lost  for  us  in  the  mist  of  ages, 
turns  out  on  enquiry  to  be  indeed  a  purely  Euhemeristic 
god  or  saint, — in  ultimate  analysis,  a  Real  Man  or  Woman. 

That  point  alone  I  hold  to  be  of  cardinal  importance, 
and  of  immense  or  almost  inestimable  illustrative  value, 
in  seeking  for  the  origin  of  the  idea  of  a  god  in  earlier 
epochs. 

In  the  second  place,  Christianity  is  thoroughly  typical 
in  all  that  concerns  its  subsequent  course  of  evolution  ;  the 


! 


PECULIARITIES  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


17 


gradual  elevation  of  its  central  Venerated  Man  into  a  God 
of  the  highest  might  and  power  ;  tne  multiplication  of 
secondary  deities  or  saints  by  worship  or  adoration  of 
other  Dead  Men  and  Women  ;  the  growth  of  a  graduated 
and  duly  subordinated  hierarchy  of  divine  personages  ;  the 
rise  of  a  legend,  with  its  miracles  and  other  supernatural 
adjuncts  ;  the  formation  of  a  definite  theology,  philoso- 
phy, and  systematic  dogmatism  ;  the  development  of 
special  artistic  forms,  and  the  growth  or  adoption  of  ap- 
propriate symbolism  ;  the  production  of  sacred  books, 
rituals,  and  formularies  ;  the  rise  of  ceremonies,  mysteries, 
initiations,  and  sacraments  ;  the  reverence  paid  to  relics, 
sacred  sites,  tombs,  and  dead  bodies  ;  and  the  close  con- 
nexion of  the  religion  as  a  whole  with  the  ideas  of  death, 
the  soul,  the  ghost,  the^  spirit,  the  resurrection  of  the  body, 
the  last  judgment,  hell,  heaven,  the  Hfe  everlasting,  and  all 
the  other  vast  group  of  concepts  which  surround  the  sim- 
ple fact  of  death  in  the  primitive  human  mind  generally. 

Now,  in  the  second  place,  let  us  look  wherein  Chris- 
tianity to  a  certain  small  extent  fails  to  be  typical,  or  at 
least  to  solve  our  fundamental  problems. 

It  fails  to  be  typical  because  it  borrows  largely  a  whole 
ready-made  theology,  and  above  all  a  single  supreme  God, 
from  a  pre-existent  religion.  In  so  far  as  it  takes  certain 
minor  features  from  other  cults,  we  can  hardly  say  with 
truth  that  it  does  not  represent  the  average  run  of  relig- 
ious systems  ;  for  almost  every  particular  new  creed  so 
bases  itself  upon  elements  of  still  earlier  faiths  ;  and  it  is 
perhaps  impossible  for  us  at  the  present  day  to  get  back  to 
anything  like  a  really  primitive  or  original  form  of  cult. 
But  Christianity  is  very  far  removed  indeed  from  all  primi- 
tive cults  in  that  it  accepts  ready-made  the  monotheistic 
conception,  the  high-water-mark,  so  to  speak,  of  religious 
philosophising.  While  in  the  frankness  with  which  it  ex- 
hibits to  us  what  is  practically  one  half  of  its  supreme  deity 
as  a  GaHlean  peasant  of  undoubted  humanity,  subsequently 
deified  and  etherealised,  it  allows  us  to  get  down  at  a  sin- 


l8        CHRISTIANITY  AS  A  RELIGIOUS  STANDARD. 


gle  step  to  the  very  origin  of  godhead  ;  yet  in  the  strength 
with  which  it  asserts  for  the  other  half  of  its  supreme  deity 
(the  Father,  with  his  shadowy  satelHte  the  Holy  Ghost)  an 
immemorial  antiquity  and  a  complete  severance  from  hu- 
man life,  it  is  the  least  anthropomorphic  and  the  most  ab- 
stract of  creeds.  In  order  to  track  the  idea  of  God  to  its 
very  source,  then,  we  must  apply  in  the  last  resort  to  this 
unresolved  element  of  Christianity — the  Hebrew  Jahweh 
— the  same  sort  of  treatment  which  we  apply  to  the  con- 
ception of  Jesus  or  Buddha  ;  — we  must  show  it  to  be  also 
the  immensely  transfigured  and  magnified  ghost  of  a  Hu- 
man Being  ;  in  the  simple  and  forcible  language  of  Swin- 
burne, "  The  shade  cast  by  the  soul  of  man." 

Furthermore,  Christianity  fails  to  be  typical  in  that  it 
borrows  also  from  pre-existing  religions  to  a  great  extent 
the  ideas  of  priesthood,  sacrifice,  the  temple,  the  altar, 
which,  owing  to  the  curious  disappearance  or  at  least  un- 
recognisability  of  the  body  of  its  founder  (or,  rather,  its 
central  object  of  worship),  have  a  less  natural  place  in  our 
Christian  system  than  in  any  other  known  form  of  relig- 
ious practice.  It  is  quite  true  that  magnificent  churches, 
a  highly-evolved  sacerdotalism,  the  sacrifice  of  the  mass, 
the  altar,  and  the  relics,  have  all  been  imported  in  their 
fullest  shape  into  developed  Christianity,  -specially  in  its 
central  or  Roman  form.  But  every  one  of  these  things  is 
partly  borrowed,  almost  as  a  survival  or  even  as  an  alien 
feature,  from  earlier  religions,  and  partly  grew  up  about 
the  secondary  worship  of  saints  and  martyrs,  their  bones, 
their  tombs,  their  catacombs,  and  their  reliquaries.  Chris- 
tianity itself,  particularly  when  viewed  as  the  worship  of 
Christ  (to  which  it  has  been  largely  reduced  in  Teutonic 
Europe),  does  not  so  naturally  lend  itself  to  these 
secondary  ceremonies  ;  and  in  those  debased  schismatic 
forms  of  the  Church  which  confine  themselves  most  strictly 
to  the  worship  of  Jesus  and  of  the  supreme  God,  sacerdo- 
talism and  sacramentalism  have  been  brought  down  to  a 


! 


/f 


PECULIARITIES  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

minimum,  so  that  the  temple  and  the  altar  have  lost  the 
greater  part  of  their  sacrificial  importance. 

1  propose,  then,  in  subsequent  chapters  to  trar,>  fh. 
growth  of  the  idea  of  a  God  from  the  mo  tTrimwteorie  ns 
ghost'  Zt  thf '  r'™",  '°™'  ■'  "e/nning  wi^h^h 

rccurning  at  last  once  more  to  the  full  rhncfi--.^  ^« 
t.on   which  we  shall  understand  far'better   n  detaTJir 
we  have  explained  the  nature  of  the  yefunr  solved  Lbu" 
provsionally  resolved  Jehovistic  element.    I  shall  trv  to 
show,  m  short,  the  evolution  of  God,  by  startinrwith  th^ 

r     '?."  °^  ^^ '"  ^*""'"'  ^"d  coming  dow  "by^adua- 
stages  through  various  races  to  the  evSlutirnof  th^  He 
brew.  Christian,  and  Moslem  God  in  particular      ^^/lu 


20 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


CHAPTER  11. 


RELIGION    AND    MYTHOLOGY. 


\\       I 


!  i 


At  the  very  outset  of  the  profound  enquiry  on  which  we 
are  now  about  to  embark,  we  are  met  by  a  difficulty  of 
considerable  magnitude.  In  the  opinion  of  most  modern 
mythologists  mythology  is  the  result  of  "  a  disease  of  lan- 
guage." We  are  assured  by  many  eminent  men  that  the 
origin  of  religion  is  to  be  sought,  not  in  savage  ideas  about 
ghosts  and  spirits,  the  Dead  Man  and  his  body  or  his  sur- 
viving double,  but  in  primitive  misconceptions  of  the 
meaning  of  words  which  had  reference  to  the  appearance 
of  the  Sun  and  the  Clouds,  the  Wind  and  the  Rain,  the 
Dawn  and  the  Dusk,  the  various  phenomena  of  meteor- 
ology in  general.  If  this  be  so,  then  our  attempt  to  derive 
the  evolution  of  gods  from  the  crude  ideas  of  early  men 
about  their  dead  is  clearly  incorrect  ;  the  analogy  of  Chris- 
tianity which  we  have  already  alleged  is  a  mere  will  o'  the 
wisp  ;  and  the  historical  Jesus  himself  may  prove  in  the 
last  resort  to  be  an  alias  of  the  sun-god  or  an  embodi- 
ment of  the  vine-spirit. 

I  do  not  believe  these  suggestions  are  correct.  It  seems 
to  me  that  the  worship  of  the  sun,  moon,  and  stars,  in- 
stead of  being  an  element  in  primitive  religion,  is  really 
a  late  and  derivative  type  of  adoration  ;  and  that  myth- 
ology is  mistaken  in  the  claims  it  makes  for  its  own  impor- 
tance in  the  genesis  of  the  idea  of  a  God  or  gods.  In  order, 
however,  to  clear  the  ground  for  a  fair  start  in  this  direc- 
tion, we  ought,  I  think,  to  begin  by  enquiring  into  the 
relative  positions  of  mythology  and  religion.    I  shall  there- 


ll 


RELIGION  IS  PRACTICE.  21 

fore  devote  a  preliminary  chapter  to  the  consideration  of 
this  important  subject. 

Religion,  says  another  group  of  modern  thinkers,  of 
whom  Mr.  Edward  Clodd  is  perhaps  the  most  able  Eng- 
lish exponent,  "  grew  out  of  fear."  It  is  born  of  man's 
terror  of  the  great  and  mysterious  natural  agencies  by 
which  he  is  surrounded.  Now  I  am  not  concerned  to 
deny  that  many  mythological  beings  of  various  terrible 
forms  do  really  so  originate.  I  would  readily  accept  some 
such  vague  genesis  for  many  of  the  dragons  and  monsters 
which  abound  in  all  savage  or  barbaric  imaginings — for 
Gorgons  and  Hydras  and  Chimaeras  dire,  and  other  mani- 
fold shapes  of  the  superstitiously  appalling.  I  would  give 
up  to  Mr.  Clodd  the  Etruscan  devils  and  the  Hebrew 
Satan,  the  Grendels  and  the  Fire-drakes,  the  whole  brood 
of  Cerberus,  Briareus,  the  Cyclops,  the  Centaurs.  None 
of  these,  however,  is  a  god  or  anything  like  one.  They 
have  no  more  to  do  with  religion,  properly  so  called,  than 
the  unicorn  of  the  royal  arms  has  to  do  with  British  Chris- 
tianity. A  god,  as  I  understand  the  word,  and  as  the  vast 
mass  of  mankind  has  always  understood  it,  is  a  super- 
natural being  to  be  revered  and  worshipped.  He  stands  to 
his  votaries,  on  the  whole,  as  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  has  well 
pointed  out,  in  a  kindly  and  protecting  relation.  He  may 
be  angry  with  them  at  times,  to  be  sure  ;  but  his  anger 
is  temporary  and  paternal  alone  :  his  permanent  attitude 
towards  his  people  is  one  of  friendly  concern  ;  he  is 
worshipped  as  a  beneficent  and  generous  Father.  It  is 
the  origin  of  gods  in  this  strictest  sense  that  concerns  us 
here,  not  the  origin  of  those  vague  and  formless  creatures 
which  are  dreaded,  not  worshipped,  by  primitive  humanity. 

Bearing  this  distinction  carefully  in  mind,  let  us  pro- 
ceed to  consider  the  essentials  of  religion.  If  you  were 
to  ask  almost  any  intelligent  and  unsophisticated  child, 
"  What  is  religion  ?  "  he  would  answer  offhand,  with  the 
clear  vision  of  youth,  "  Oh,  it's  saying  your  prayers,  and 
reading  your  Bible,  and  singing  hymns,  and  going  to 


If 


23 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


|i      t 


fi 


church  or  to  chapel  on  Sundays."  If  you  were  to  ask  any 
intelligent  and  unsophisticated  Hindu  peasant  the  same 
question,  he  would  answer  in  almost  the  self-same  spirit, 
"  Oh,  it  is  doing  poojah  regularly,  and  paying  your  dues 
every  day  to  Mahadeo."  If  you  were  to  ask  any  simple- 
minded  African  savage,  he  would  similarly  reply,  "  It  is 
giving  the  gods  flour,  and  oil,  and  native  beer,  and  goat- 
mutton."  And  finally  if  you  were  to  ask  a  devout  Italian 
contadino,  he  would  instantly  say,  "  It  is  offering  up  can- 
dles and  prayers  to  the  Madonna,  attending  mass,  and  re- 
membering the  saints  on  every  festa." 

And  they  would  all  be  quite  right.  This,  in  its  essence, 
is  precisely  what  we  call  religion.  Apart  from  the  special 
refinements  of  the  higher  minds  in  particular  creeds,  which 
strive  to  import  into  it  all,  according  to  their  special  tastes 
or  fancies,  a  larger  or  smaller  dose  of  philosophy,  or  of 
metaphysics,  or  of  ethics,  or  of  mysticism,  this  is  just  what 
religion  means  and  has  always  meant  to  the  vast  majority 
of  the  hjman  species.  What  is  common  to  it  throughout 
is  Custom  or  Practice  :  a  certain  set  of  more  or  less  similar 
Observances  :  propitiation,  prayer,  praise,  offerings  :  the 
request  for  divine  favours,  the  deprecation  of  divine  anger 
or  other  misfortunes  :  and  as  the  outward  and  visible  ad- 
juncts of  all  these,  the  altar,  the  sacrifice,  the  temple,  the 
church  ;  priesthood,  services,  vestments,  ceremonial. 

What  is  not  at  all  essential  to  religion  in  its  wider  aspect 
— taking  the  world  round,  both  past  and  present.  Pagan, 
Buddhist,  Mohammadan,  Christian,  savage,  and  civilised — 
is  the  ethical  element,  properly  so  called.  And  what  is  very 
little  essential  indeed  is  the  philosophical  element,  theo- 
logy or  mythology,  the  abstract  theory  of  spiritual  exist- 
ences. This  theory,  to  be  sure,  is  in  each  country  or  race 
closely  related  with  religion  under  certain  aspects  ;  and 
the  stories  told  about  the  gods  or  God  are  much  mixed  up 
with  the  cult  itself  in  the  minds  of  worshippers  ;  but 
they  are  no  proper  part  of  religion,  strictly  so  called.  In 
a  single  word,  I  contend  that  religion,  as  such,  is  essen- 


I 


TWO  CONFLICTING  SCHOOLS  OF  THOUGHT. 


23 


tially  practical  :  theology  or  mythology,  as  such,  is  essen- 
tially theoretical. 

Moreover,  I  also  believe,  and  shall  attempt  to  show, 
that  the  two  have  to  a  large  extent  distinct  origins  and 
roots  :  that  the  union  between  them  is  in  great  part 
adventitious  :  and  that,  therefore,  to  account  for  or  ex- 
plain the  one  is  by  no  means  equivalent  to  accounting  for 
and  explaining  the  other. 

Frank  recognition  of  this  difference  of  origin  between  i- 
religion  and  mythology  would,  I  imagine,  largely  recon-  ' 
cile  the  two  conflicting  school''>  of  thought  which  at  pre-  ^  t 
sent  divide  opinion  between  them  on  this  interesting  pro- 
blem in  the  evolution  of  human  ideas.  On  the  one  side, 
we  have  the  mythological  school  of  interpreters,  whether  ^-^ 
narrowly  linguistic,  like  Professor  Max  Miiller,  or  broadly 
anthropological,  like  Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  attacking  the 
problem  from  the  point  of  view  of  myth  or  theory  alone. 
On  the  other  side,  we  have  the  truly  religious  school  of 
interpreters,  like  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  and  to  some  extent 
Mr.  Tylor,  attacking  the  problem  from  the  point  of  view 
of  practice  or  real  religion.  The  former  school,  it  seems  to 
me,  has  failed  to  perceive  that  what  it  is  accounting  for 
is  not  the  origin  of  religion  at  all— of  worship,  which  is  the 
central-root  idea  of  all  religious  observance,  or  of  the 
temple,  the  altar,  the  priest,  and  the  cifering,  which  are  its 
outer  expression — but  merely  the  origin  of  myth  or  fable, 
the  mass  of  story  and  legend  about  various  beings,  real  or 
imaginary,  human  or  divine,  which  naturally  grows  up 
in  every  primitive  community.  The  latter  school,  on  the 
other  hand,  while  correctly  interpreting  the  origin  of  all 
that  is  essential  and  central  in  religion,  have  perhaps  un- 
derestimated the  value  of  their  opponents'  work  through 
regarding  it  as  really  opposed  to  their  own,  instead  of  ac- 
cepting what  part  of  it  may  be  true  in  the  light  of  a  con- 
tribution to  an  independent  but  allied  branch  of  the  same 
enquiry. 

In  short,  if  the  view  here  suggested  be  correct,  Spencer 


l.j 


I 


24 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


and  Tylor  have  paved  the  way  to  a  true  theory  of  the     1 
Origin  of  Rehgion  ;    Max  Muller,  Lang,  and  the  other    / 
mythologists  have  thrown  out  hints  of  varying  value  to-.  / 
wards  a  true  theory  of  the  Origin  of  Mythology,  or  of  its  / 
more  modern  equivalent  and  successor,  Theology.  *  \ 

A  brief  outline  of  facts  will  serve  to  bring  into  clearer 
relief  this  view  of  religion  as  essentially  practical — a  set  of 
observances,  rendered  inevitable  by  the  primitive  data  of 
human  psychology.  It  will  then  be  seen  that  what  is 
fundamental  and  essential  in  religion  is  the  body  of  prac- 
tices, remaining  throughout  all  stages  of  human  develop- 
ment the  same,  or  nearly  the  same,  in  spite  of  changes 
of  mythological  or  theological  theory  ;  and  that  what  is 
accidental  and  variable  is  the  particular  verbal  explanation 
or  philosophical  reason  assigned  for  the  diverse  rites  and 
ceremonies.  — I 

In  its  simplest  surviving  savage  type,  religion  consists 
wholly  and  solely  in  certain  acts  of  deference  paid  by  the 
living  to  the  persons  of  the  dead.  I  shall  try  to  show  in 
the  sequel  that  down  to  its  most  highly  evolved  modern 
type  in  the  most  cultivated  societies,  precisely  similar  acts 
of  deference,  either  directly  to  corpses  or  ghosts  as  such, 
or  indirectly  to  gods  who  were  once  ghosts,  or  were  de- 
veloped from  ghosts,  form  its  essence  still.  But  to  begin 
with  I  will  try  to  bring  a  few  simple  instances  of  the  prep  ^y. 
cise  nature  of  religion  in  its  lowest  existing  savage  mode.  \ 

I  might  if  I  chose  take  my  little  collection  of  illustrative 
facts  from  some  theoretical  writer,  like  Mr.  Herbert  Spen- 
cer, who  has  collected  enough  instances  in  all  conscience 
to  prove  this  point  ;  but  I  prefer  to  go  straight  to  an 
original  observer  of  savage  life  and  habit,  a  Presbyterian 
missionary  in  Central  Africa  — the  Rev.  DufT  Macdonald, 
author  of  Africana — who  had  abundant  opportunities  at 
the  Blantyre  Mission  for  learning  the  ideas  and  practice 
of  the  Soudanese  natives,  and  who  certainly  had  no  theo- 
retic predisposition  towards  resolving  all  religious  notions 


I' 


/•,r 


r 


|i 


■y 


A 

ir     ' 


s 
s 
n 
\ 

s 
e 
1 


0 


\y 


.11 


CONTEMPORARY  GOD-MAKING. 


^5 


into  the  primitive  respect  and  reverence  for  the  dead  or 
the  worship  of  ancestors. 

Here,  in  outline,  but  in  Mr.  Macdonald's  own  words,  are 
the  ideas  and  observances  which  this  careful  and  accurate 
investigator  found  current  among  the  tribes  of  the  heart  of 
Africa.  "  I  do  not  think,"  he  says,  "  I  have  admitted  any 
point  of  importance  without  having  heard  at  least  four 
natives  on  the  subject.  The  statements  are  translations, 
as  far  as  possible,  from  the  ipsissima  verba  of  the  negroes." 

The  tribes  he  lived  among  "  are  unanimous  in  saying 
that  there  is  something  beyond  the  body  which  they  call 
spirit.  Every  human  body  at  death  is  forsaken  by  this 
spirit."  That  is  the  almost  universal  though  not  quite 
primitive  belief,  whose  necessary  genesis  has  been  well 
traced  out  by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  and  more  recently 
in  America  with  great  vigour  and  clearness  by  Mr.  Lester 
Ward. 

"  Do  these  spirits  ever  die  ? "  Mr.  Macdonald  asks. 
"  Some,"  he  answers,  "  I  have  heard  affirm  that  it  is  possi- 
ble for  a  troublesome  spirit  to  be  killed.  Others  give  this 
a  direct  denial.  Many,  like  Kumpama,  or  Cherasulo,  say, 
*  You  ask  me  whether  a  man's  spirit  ever  dies.  I  cannot 
tell.  I  have  never  been  in  the  spirit-world,  but  this  I  am 
certain  of,  that  spirits  live  for  a  very  long  time.'  " 

On  the  question,  "  Who  the  gods  are  ?  "  Mr.  Macdonald 
says  : 

"  In  all  our  translations  of  Scripture  where  we  found  the 
word  God  we  used  Mulungu  ;  but  this  word  is  chiefly 
used  by  the  natives  as  a  general  name  for  spirit.  The 
spirit  of  a  deceased  man  is  called  his  Mulungu,  and  all  the 
prayers  and  offerings  of  the  living  are  presented  to  such 
spirits  of  the  dead.  It  is  here  that  we  find  the  great 
centre  of  the  native  religion.  The  spirits  of  the  dead  are 
the  gods  of  the  living. 

"  Where  are  these  gods  found  ?  At  the  grave  ?  No. 
The  villagers  shrink  from  yonder  gloomy  place  that  lies 
far  beyond  their  fields  on  the  bleak  mountain  side.     It  is 


26 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


1 


only  when  they  have  to  lay  another  sleeper  beside  his  fore- 
fathers that  they  will  go  there.  Their  god  is  not  the  body 
in  the  grave,  but  the  spirit,  and  they  seek  this  spirit  at  the 
place  where  their  departed  kinsman  last  lived  among  them. 
It  is  the  great  tree  at  the  verandah  of  the  dead  man's  house 
that  is  their  temple  ;  and  if  no  tree  grow  here  they  erect 
a  little  shade,  and  there  perform  their  simple  rites.  If 
this  spot  become  too  public,  the  oflferings  may  be  defiled, 
and  the  sanctuary  will  be  removed  to  a  carefully-selected 
spot  under  some  beautiful  tree.  Very  frequently  a  man 
presents  an  offering  at  the  top  of  his  own  bed  beside  his 
head.  He  wishes  his  god  to  come  to  him  and  whisper 
in  his  ear  as  he  sleeps." 

And  here,  again,  we  get  the  origin  of  nature-worship  : 

"  The  spirit  of  an  old  chief  may  have  a  whole  mountain 
for  his  residence,  but  he  dwells  chiefly  on  the  cloudy  sum- 
mit. There  he  sits  to  receive  the  worship  of  his  votaries, 
and  to  send  down  the  refreshing  showers  in  answer  to  their 
prayers." 

Almost  as  essential  to  religion  as  these  prime  factors  in 
its  evolution — the  god,  worship,  oflferings,  presents,  holy 
places,  temples — is  the  existence  of  a  priesthood.  Here 
is  how  the  Central  Africans  arrive  at  that  special 
function  : 

"  A  certain  amount  of  etiquette  is  observed  in  approach- 
ing the  gods.  In  no  case  can  a  little  boy  or  girl  approach 
these  deities,  neither  can  anyone  that  has  not  been  at  the 
mysteries.  The  comr  aon  qualification  is  that  a  person  has 
attained  a  certain  age,  about  twelve  or  fourteen  years,  and 
has  a  house  of  his  own.  Slaves  seldom  pray,  except  \/hen 
they  have  had  a  dream.  Children  that  have  had  a  dream 
tell  their  mother,  who  approaches  the  deity  on  their  be- 
half. (A  present  for  the  god  is  necessary,  and  the  slave 
or  child  may  not  have  it.) 

"  Apart  from  the  case  of  dreams  and  a  few  such  private 
matters,  it  is  not  usual  for  anyone  to  approach  the  gods 
except  the  chief  of  the  village.     He  is  the  recognised  high 


DEAD  CHIEFS  AS  GODS. 


a; 


priest  who  presents  prayers  and  offerings  on  behalf  of  all 
that  live  in  his  village.  If  the  chief  is  from  home  his  wife 
will  act,  and  if  both  are  absent,  his  younger  brother.  The 
natives  worship  not  so  much  individually  as  in  villages  or 
communities.  Their  religion  is  more  a  public  than  a  pri- 
vate matter." 

But  there  are  also  further  reasons  why  priests  are  neces- 
sary. Relationship  forms  always  a  good  ground  for  inter- 
cession.    A  mediator  is  needed. 

"  The  chief  of  a  village,"  says  Mr.  Macdonald,  "  has 
another  title  to  the  priesthood.  It  is  his  relatives  that  are 
the  village  gods.  Everyone  that  lives  in  the  village  recog- 
nises these  gods  ;  but  if  anyone  remove  to  another  vil- 
lage he  changes  his  gods.  He  recognises  now  the  gods  of 
his  new  chief.  One  wishing  to  pray  to  the  god  (or  gods) 
of  any  village  naturally  desires  to  have  his  prayers  pre- 
sented through  the  village  chief,  because  the  latter  is 
nearly  related  to  the  village  god,  and  may  be  expected 
to  be  better  listened  to  than  a  stranger." 

A  little  further  on  Mr.  Macdonald  says  :     «— - 

"  On  the  subject  of  the  village  gods  opinions  differ. 
Some  say  that  every  one  in  the  village,  whether  a  relative 
of  the  chief  or  not,  must  worship  the  forefathers  of  the 
chief.  Others  say  that  a  person  not  related  to  the  chief 
must  worship  his  own  forefathers,  otherwise  their  spirits 
will  bring  trouble  upon  him.  To  reconcile  these  author- 
ities we  may  mention  that  nearly  everyone  in  the  village  is 
related  to  its  chief,  or  if  not  related  is,  in  courtesy,  con- 
sidered so.  Any  person  not  related  to  the  village  chief 
would  be  polite  enough  on  all  public  occasions  to  recog- 
nise the  village  god  :  on  occasions  of  private  prayer  (which 
are  not  so  numerous  as  in  Christendom)  he  would  ap- 
proach the  spirits  of  his  own  forefathers. 

"  Besides,  there  might  be  a  god  of  the  land.  The  chief 
Kapeni  prays  to  his  own  relatives,  and  also  to  the  old  gods 
of  the  place.  His  own  relatives  he  approaches  himself ; 
the  other  deities  he  may  also  approach  himself,  but  he 


28 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


often  finds  people  more  closely  related  and  consequently 
more  acceptable  to  the  old  gods  of  the  land." 

The  African  pantheon  is  thus  widely  peopled.  Elimi- 
nation and  natural  selection  next  give  one  the  transition 
from  the  ghost  to  the  god,  properly  so  called. 

"  The  gods  of  the  natives  then  are  nearly  as  numerous 
as  their  dead.  It  is  impossible  to  worship  all  ;  a  selection 
must  be  made,  and,  as  we  have  indicated,  each  worshipper 
turns  most  naturally  to  the  spirits  of  his  own  departed 
relatives  ;  but  his  gods  are  too  many  still,  and  in  farther 
selecting  he  turns  to  those  that  have  lived  nearest  his  own 
time.  Thus  the  chief  of  a  village  will  not  trouble  himself 
about' his  great-great-grandfather  :  he  will  present  his  of- 
fering to  his  own  immediate  predecessor,  and  say,  *  O 
father,  I  do  not  know  all  your  relatives,  you  know  them  all, 
invite  them  to  feast  with  you.'  The  offering  is  not  simply 
for  himself,  but  for  himself  and  all  his  relatives." 

Ordinary  ghosts  are  soon  forgotten  with  the  generation 
that  knew  them.  Not  so  a  few  select  spirits,  the  Caesars 
and  Napoleons,  the  Charlemagnes  and  Timurs  of  savage 
empires. 

"  A  great  chief  that  has  been  successful  in  his  wars  does 
not  pass  out  of  memory  so  soon.  He  may  become  the 
god  of  a  mountain  or  a  lake,  and  may  receive  homage  as  a 
local  deity  long  after  his  own  descendants  have  been  driven 
from  the  spot.  When  there  is  a  suppHcation  for  rain  the 
inhabitants  of  the  country  pray  not  so  much  to  their  own 
forefathers  as  to  the  god  of  yonder  mountain  on  whose 
shoulders  the  great  rain-clouds  repose.  (Smaller  hills  are 
seldom  honoured  with  a  deity.)" 

Well,  in  all  this  we  get,  it  seems  to  me,  the  very  essentials 
and  universals  of  leligion  generally, — the  things  without 
which  no  religion  could  exist — the  vital  part,  without  the 
ever-varying  and  changeable  additions  of  mere  gossiping 
mythology.  In  the  presents  brought  to  the  dead  man's 
grave  to  appease  the  ghost,  we  have  the  central  element  of 
all  worship,  the  practical  key  of  all  cults,  past  or  present. 


SACRIFICE  AND  RELIGION. 


29 


On  the  other  hand,  mythologists  tell  us  nothing  about  the 
origin  of  prayer  and  sacrifice  :  they  put  us  off  with  stories 
of  particular  gods,  without  explaining  to  us  how  those 
gods  ever  came  to  be  worshipped.  Now,  mythology  is  a 
very  interesting  study  in  its  own  way  :  but  to  treat  as  re- 
ligion a  mass  of  stories  and  legends  about  gods  or  saints, 
with  hardly  a  single  living  element  of  practice  or  sacrifice, 
seems  to  me  simply  to  confuse  two  totally  distinct  branches 
of  human  enquiry.  The  Origin  of  Tales  has  nothing  at 
all  to  do  with  the  Origin  of  Worship. 

When  we  come  to  read  Mr.  Macdonald's  account  of  a 
native  funeral,  on  the  other  hand,  we  are  at  once  on  a 
totally  different  tack  ;  we  can  understand,  as  by  an  electric 
flash,  the  genesis  of  the  primitive  acts  of  sacrifice  and  re- 
ligion. 

"  Along  with  the  deceased  is  buried  a  considerable  part 
of  his  property.  We  have  already  seen  that  his  bed  is 
buried  with  him  ;  so  also  are  all  his  clothes.  Tf  he  pos- 
sesses several  tusks  of  ivory,  one  tusk  or  more  is  ground 
to  a  powder  between  two  stones  and  put  beside  him. 
Beads  are  also  ground  down  in  the  same  way.  These 
precautions  are  taken  to  prevent  the  witch  (who  is  sup- 
posed to  be  answerable  for  his  death)  from  making  any  use 
of  the  ivory  or  beads. 

"If  the  deceased  owner  several  slaves,  an  enormous 
hole  is  dug  for  a  grave.  The  slaves  are  now  brought  for- 
ward. They  may  be  either  cast  into  the  pit  alive,  or  the 
undertakers  may  cut  all  their  throats.  The  body  of  their 
master  or  their  mistress  is  then  laid  down  to  rest  above 
theirs,  and  the  grave  is  covered  in. 

"  After  this  the  women  come  forward  with  the  offerings 
of  food,  and  place  them  at  the  head  of  the  grave.  The 
dishes  in  which  the  food  was  '  rought  are  left  behind.  The 
pot  that  held  the  drinking-water  of  the  deceased  and  his 
drinking-cup  are  also  left  with  him.  These,  too,  might  be 
coveted  by  the  witch,  but  a  hole  is  pierced  in  the  pot,  and 
the  drinking  calabash  is  broken. 


30 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


f 


'1 


"  The  man  has  now  gone  from  the  society  of  the  living, 
and  he  is  expected  to  share  the  meal  thus  left  at  his  grave 
with  those  that  have  gone  before  him.  The  funeral  party 
breaks  up  ;  they  do  not  want  to  visit  the  grave  of  their 
friend  again  without  a  very  good  reason.  Anyone  found 
among  the  graves  may  be  taken  for  a  cannibal.  Their 
friend  has  become  a  citizen  of  a  different  village.  He  is 
with  all  his  relatives  of  the  past.  He  is  entitled  to  offer- 
ings or  presents  which  may  come  to  him  individually  or 
through  his  chief.  These  offerings  in  most  cases  he  will 
share  with  others,  just  as  he  used  to  do  when  alive."  / ; 

Sometimes  the  man  may  be  buried  in  his  own  hut. 

"  In  this  case  the  house  is  not  taken  down,  but  is  gener- 
ally covered  with  cloth,  and  the  verandah  becomes  the 
place  for  presenting  offerings.  His  old  house  thus  be" 
comes  a  kind  of  temple ....  The  deceased  is  now  in  the 
spirit-world,  and  receives  offerings  and  adoration.  He  is 
addressed  as  *  Our  great  spirit  that  has  gone  before.*  If 
anyone  dream  of  him,  it  is  at  once  concluded  that  the 
spirit  is  *  up  to  something.'  Very  likely  he  wants  to  have 
some  of  the  survivors  for  his  companions.  The  dreamer 
hastens  to  appease  the  spirit  by  an  offering." 

So  real  is  this  society  of  the  dead  that  Mr.  Macdonald 
says  : 

"  The  practice  of  sending  messengers  to  the  world  be- 
yond the  grave  is  found  on  the  West  Coast.     A  chief  sum 
mons  a  slave,  delivers  to  him  a  message,  and  then  cuts  ^ff 
his  head.     If  the  chief  forget  anything  that  he  wanted  to 
say,  he  sends  another  slave  as  a  postscript." 

I  have  quoted  at  such  length  from  this  recent  and  ex- 
tremely able  work  because  I  want  to  bring  into  strong 
relief  the  fact  that  we  have  here  going  on  under  our  very 
eyes,  from  day  to  day,  de  novo,  the  entire  genesis  of  new 
gods  and  goddesses,  and  of  all  that  is  most  central  and  es- 
sential to  religion — worship,  prayer,  jthe  temple,  the  altar, 
priesthood,  sacrifice.  Nothing  that  the  mythologists  can 
tell  us  about  the  Sun  or  the  Moon,  the  Dawn  or  the  Storm- 


t 


\ 


I 

'V 


■il 


THE  WORSHIP  OF  ANCESTORS. 


31 


IS 


iX- 

iry 
lew 
es- 
lar, 
:an 
im- 


I 


cloud,  Little  Red  Riding  Hood  or  Cinderella  and  the 
Glass  Slipper,  comes  anywhere  near  the  Origin  of  Religion 
in  these  its  central  and  universal  elements.  Those  stories 
or  guesses  may  be  of  immense  interest  and  importance  as 
contributions  to  the  history  of  ideas  in  our  race  ;  but  no- 
thing we  can  learn  about  the  savage  survival  in  the  myth 
of  Cupid  or  Psyche,  or  about  the  primitive  cosmology  in 
the  myth  of  the  children  of  Kronos,  helps  us  to  get  one 
inch  nearer  the  origin  of  God  or  of  prayer,  of  worship,  of 
religious  ceremonial,  of  the  temple,  the  church,  the  sac- 
rifice, the  mass,  or  any  other  component  part  of  what  we 
really  know  as  Religion  in  the  concrete.  These  myths 
may  be  sometimes  philosophic  guesses,  sometimes  primi- 
tive folk-tales,  but  they  certainly  are  not  the  truths  of  Re- 
ligion. On  the  other  hand,  the  living  facts,  here  so  simply 
detailed  by  a  careful,  accurate,  and  unassuming  observer, 
strengthened  by  the  hundreds  of  similar  facts  collected  by 
Tylor,  Spencer,  and  others,  do  help  us  at  once  to  under- 
stand the  origin  of  the  central  core  and  kernel  of  religion 
as  universally  practised  all  the  world  over. 

For,  omitting  for  the  present  the  mythological  and  cos- 
mological  factor,  which  so  often  comes  in  to  obscure  the 
plain  religious  facts  in  missionary  narrative  or  highly-col- 
oured European  accounts  of  native  beliefs,  what  do  we 
really  find  as  the  underlying  truths  of  all  religion  ?  That 
all  the  world  over  practices  essentially  similar  to  those  of 
these  savage  Central  Africans  prevail  among  mankind  ; 
practices  whose  affiliation  upon  the  same  primitive  ideas 
has  been  abundantly  proved  by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  ; 
practices  which  have  for  their  essence  the  propitiation  or 
adulation  of  a  spiritual  being  or  beings,  derived  from 
ghosts,  and  conceived  of  as  similar,  in  all  except  the  great- 
ness of  the  connoted  attributes,  to  the  souls  of  men. 
"Whenever  the  [Indian]  villagers  are  questioned  about 
their  creed,"  says  Sir  William  Hunter,  "  the  same  answer 
is  invariably  given  :  *  The  common  people  have  no  idea  of 


32 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


ii 


I     \\ 


ffl    I 


religion,  but  to  do  right  [ceremonially]  and  to  worship  the 
village  god.'  " 

In  short,  I  maintain  that  religion  is  not  mainly,  as  the 
mistaken  analogy  of  Christian  usage  makes  us  erroneously 
call  it.  Faith  or  Creed,  but  simply  and  solely  Ceremony, 
Custom,  or  Practice.  And  I  am  glad  to  say  that,  for  early 
Semitic  times  at  least,  Professor  Robertson  Smith  is  of 
the  same  opinion. 

If  one  looks  at  the  vast  mass  of  the  world,  ancient  and 
modern,  it  is  quite  clear  that  religion  consists,  and  has 
always  consisted,  of  observances  essentially  similar  to  those 
just  described  among  the  Central  African  tribes.  Its  core 
is  worship.  Its  centre  is  the  God — that  is  to  say,  the 
Dead  Ancestor  or  Relative.  The  religion  of  Chma  is  to 
this  day  almost  entirely  one  of  pure  ancestor-cult.  The 
making  of  oflferings  and  burning  of  joss-paper  before  the 
Family  Dead  form  its  principal  ceremonies.  In  India, 
while  the  three  great  gods  of  the  mystical  Brahmanist 
philosophy  are  hardly  worshipped  in  actual  practice  at  all, 
every  community  and  every  house  has  its  own  particular 
gods  and  its  own  special  cult  of  its  little  domestic  altar. 

"  The  first  Englishman,"  says  Sir  William  Hunter, 
"  who  tried  to  study  the  natives  as  they  actually  are,  and 
not  as  the  Brahmans  described  them,  was  struck  by  the 
universal  prevalence  of  a  worship  quite  distinct  from  that 
of  the  Hindu  deities.  A  Bengal  village  has  usually  its 
local  god,  which  it  adores  either  in  the  form  of  a  rude  un- 
hewn stone,  or  a  stump,  or  a  tree  marked  with  red-lead. 
Sometimes  a  lump  of  clay  placed  under  a  tree  does  duty 
for  a  deity,  and  the  attendant  priest,  when  there  is  one, 
generally  belongs  to  one  of  the  half-Hinduised  low-castes. 
The  rude  stone  represents  the  non-Aryan  fetish  ;  and  the 
tree  seems  to  owe  its  sanctity  to  the  non- Aryan  belief  that 
it  forms  the  abode  of  the  ghosts,  or  gods,  of  the  village." 

Omitting  the  mere  guesswork  about  the  fetish  and  the 
gratuitous  supposition,  made  out  of  deference  to  the  dying 
creed    of    Max-Miillerism,    that    ancestor-worship    must 


SACREDNESS  OP  DEAD  BODIES. 


33 


necessarily  be  a  "  non-Aryan  "  feature  (though  it  exists 
or  existed  in  all  so-called  Aryan  races),  this  simple  de- 
scription shows  us  the  prevalence  over  the  whole  of  India 
of  customs  essentially  similar  to  those  which  obtain  in 
Central  Africa  and  in  the  Chinese  provinces. 

The  Roman  religion,  in  somewhat  the  same  way,  sep- 
arates itself  at  once  into  a  civic  or  national  and  a  private 
or  family  cult.  There  were  the  great  gods,  native  or 
adopted,  whom  the  State  worshipped  publicly,  as  the  Cen- 
tral African  tribes  worship  the  chief's  ancestors  ;  and  there 
were  the  Lares  and  Penates,  whom  the  family  worshipped 
at  its  own  hearth,  and  whose  very  name  shows  them  to 
have  been  in  origin  and  essence  ancestral  spirits.  And  as 
the  real  or  practical  Hindu  religion  consists  mainly  of 
offering  up  rice,  millet,  and  ghee  to  the  little  local  and 
family  deities  or  to  the  chosen  patron  god  in  the  Brahman- 
ist  pantheon,  so,  too,  the  real  or  practical  Roman  religion 
consisted  mainly  of  sacrifice  done  at  the  domestic  altar  to 
the  special  Penates,  farre  pio  et  saliente  mica. 

I  will  not  go  on  to  point  out  in  detail  at  the  present 
stage  of  our  argument  how  Professor  Sayce  similarly  finds 
ancestor-worship  and  Shamanism  (a  low  form  of  ghost- 
propitiation)  at  the  root  of  the  religion  of  the  ancient  Ac- 
cadians  ;  how  other  observers  have  performed  the  same 
task  for  the  Egyptians  and  Japanese  ;  and  how  like  cus- 
toms have  been  traced  among  Greeks  and  Amazulu, 
among  Hebrews  and  Nicaraguans,  among  early  EngHsh 
and  Digger  Indians,  among  our  Aryan  ancestors  them- 
selves and  Andaman  Islanders.  Every  recent  narrative  of 
travel  abounds  with  examples.  Of  Netherland  Island  I 
read,  **  The  skulls  of  their  ancestors  were  treasured  for 
gods ;"  of  the  New  Hebrides,  "The  people  worshipped  the 
spirits  of  their  ancestors.  They  prayed  to  them,  over  the 
kava-bowl,  for  health  and  prosperity."  In  New  Cale- 
donia, "  Their  gods  were  their  ancestors,  whose  relics  they 
kept  up  and  idolised."  At  Tana,  "  The  general  name  for 
gods  seemed  to  be  aremha  ;  that  means  a  dead  man,  and 


f 


■ER! 


appp 


34 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


■ 


hints,"  says  the  Rev.  George  Turner,  with  pleasing  frank- 
ness, "  alike  at  the  origin  and  nature  of  their  religious 
worship."  When  the  chief  prayed,  he  offered  up  yam  and 
fruits,  saying,  "  Compassionate  father,  here  is  some  food 
for  you  ;  eat  it.  Be  kind  to  us  on  account  of  it."  Those 
who  wish  to  see  the  whole  of  the  evidence  on  this  matter 
marshalled  in  battle  array  have  only  to  turn  to  the  first 
volume  of  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  Principles  of  Sociology, 
where  they  will  find  abundant  examples  from  all  times 
and  places  gathered  together  in  a  vast  and  overwhelming 
phalanx. 

What  concerns  us  in  this  chapter  a  little  more  is  to  call 
attention  by  anticipation  to  the  fact  that  even  in  Chris- 
tianity itself  the  same  primitive  element  survives  as  the 
centre  of  all  that  is  most  distinctively  religious,  as  opposed 
to  theological,  in  the  Christian  religion.  And  I  make 
these  remarks  provisionally  here  in  order  that  the  reader 
may  the  better  understan.l  to  what  ultimate-  goal  our  in- 
vestigation will  lead  him. 

It  is  the  universal  Catholic  custom  to  place  the  relics 
of  saints  or  martyrs  under  the  altars  in  churches.  Thus 
the  body  of  St.  Mark  the  Evangelist  lies  under  the  high 
altar  of  St.  Mark's,  at  Venice  ;  and  in  every  other  Italian 
cathedral,  or  chapel,  a  reliquary  is  deposited  within  the 
altar  itself.  So  well  understood  is  this  principle  in  the 
Latin  Church,  that  it  has  hardened  into  the  saying,  "No 
relic,  no  altar."  The  sacrifice  of  the  mass  takes  place  at 
such  an  altar,  and  is  performed  by  a  priest  in  sacrificial 
robes.  The  entire  Roman  Catholic  ritual  is  a  ritual  de- 
rived from  the  earlier  sacerdotal  ideas  of  ministry  at  an 
altar,  and  its  connection  with  the  primitive  form  is  still 
kept  up  by  the  necessary  presence  of  human  remains  in  its 
holy  places. 

Furthermore,  the  very  idea  of  a  church  itself  is  de- 
scended from  the  early  Christian  meeting-places  in  the 
catacombs  or  at  the  tombs  of  the  martyrs,  which  are  uni- 
versally allowed  to  have  been  the  primitive   Christian 


I 


ESSENTIALS  OF  RELIGION.  .^ 

altars.  We  know  now  that  the  cruciform  dome-covered 
plan  of  Christian  churches  is  derived  from  these  early 
meeting-places  at  the  junction  of  lanes  or  alleys  in  the 
catacombs  ;  that  the  nave,  chancel,  and  transepts  indicate 
the  crossing  of  the  alleys,  while  the  dome  represents  the 
hollowed-out  portion  or  rudely  circular  vault  where  the 
two  lines  of  archway  intersect.  The  earliest  dome-cov- 
ered churches  were  attempts,  as  it  were,  to  construct  a  cat- 
acomb above  ground  for  the  reception  of  the  altar-tomb  of 
a  saint  or  martyr.  Similarly  with  the  chapels  that  open 
out  at  the  side  from  the  aisles  or  transepts.  Etymolo- 
gically,  the  word  chapel  is  the  modernised  form  of  capella, 
the  arched  sepulchre  excavated  in  the  walls  of  the  cata- 
combs, before  the  tomb  at  which  it  was  usual  to  offer  up 
prayer  and  praise.  The  chapels  built  out  from  the  aisles 
in  Roman  churches,  each  with  its  own  altar  and  its  own 
saintly  reHcs,  are  attempts  to  reproduce  above  ground  in 
the  same  way  the  original  sacred  places  in  the  early  Chris- 
tian excavated  cemeteries.  We  will  recur  to  this  subject 
at  much  greater  length  in  subsequent  chapters. 

Thus  Christianity  itself  is  linked  on  to  the  very  antique 
custom  of  worship  at  tombs,  and  the  habit  of  ancestor- 
worship  by  altars,  relics,  and  invocation  of  saints,  even 
revolutionary  Protestantism  still  retaining  some  last  faint 
marks  of  its  origin  in  the  dedication  of  churches  to  par- 
ticular evangelists  or  martyrs,  and  in  the  more  or  less  dis- 
guised survival  of  altar,  priesthood,  sacrifice,  and  vest- 
ments. 

Now,  I  do  not  say  ancestor-worship  gives  us  the  whole 
origin  of  everything  that  is  included  in  Christian  English 
minds  in  the  idea  of  rehgion.  I  do  not  say  it  accounts  for 
all  the  cosmologies  and  cosmogonies  of  savage,  barbaric, 
or  civilised  tribes.  Those,  for  the  most  part,  are  pure 
mythological  products,  explicable  mainly,  I  believe,  by 
means  of  the  key  with  which  mythology  supplies  us  ;  and 
one  of  them,  adopted  into  Genesis  from  an  alien  source,, 
has  come  to  be  accepted  by  modern  Christendom  as  part 


y 


mm 


36 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


II 


;,|     1  , 
:-      I  ! 


Hi 

i 


of  that  organised  body  of  belief  which  forms  the  Christian 
creed,  though  not  in  any  true  sense  the  Christian  reHgion. 
Nor  do  I  say  that  ancestor-worship  gives  us  the  origin 
of  those  ontological,  metaphysical,  or  mystical  concep- 
tions which  form  part  of  the  philosophy  or  theology  of 
many  priesthoods.  Religions,  as  we  generally  get  them 
envisaged  for  us  nowadays,  are  held  to  include  the  my- 
thology, the  cosmogony,  the  ontology,  and  even  the  ethics 
of  the  race  that  practises  them.  These  extraneous  de- 
velopments, however,  I  hold  to  spring  from  different  roots 
and  to  have  nothing  necessarily  in  common  with  religion 
proper.  The  god  is  the  true  crux.  If  we  have  once 
accounted  for  the  origin  of  ghosts,  gods,  tombs,  altars, 
temples,  churches,  worship,  sacrifice,  priesthoods,  and 
ceremonies,  then  we  have  accounted  for  all  that  is  essen- 
tial and  central  in  religion,  and  may  hand  over  the  rest — 
the  tales,  stories,  and  pious  legends — to  the  account  of 
comparative  mythology  or  of  the  yet  unfounded  science 
of  comparative  idealogy. 

Once  more,  I  do  not  wish  to  insist,  either,  that  every 
particular  and  individual  god,  national  or  naturalistic, 
must  necessarily  represent  a  particular  ghost — the  dead 
spirit  of  a  single  definite  once-living  person.  It  is  enough 
to  show,  as  Mr.  Spencer  has  shown,  that  the  idea  of  the 
god,  and  the  worship  paid  to  a  god,  are  directly  derived 
from  the  idea  of  the  ghost,  and  the  offerings  made  to  the 
ghost,  without  necessarily  holding,  as  Mr.  Spencer  seems 
to  hold,  that  every  god  is  and  must  be  in  ultimate  analysis 
the  ghost  of  a  particular  human  being.  Once  the  con- 
ception of  gods  had  been  evolved  by  humanity,  and  had 
become  a  common  part  of  every  man's  imagined  universe 
— of  the  world  as  it  presented  itself  to  the  mind  of  the  per- 
cipient— then  it  was  natural  enough  that  new  gods  should 
be  made  from  time  to  time  out  of  abstractions  or  special 
aspects  and  powers  of  nature,  and  that  the  same  worship 
should  be  paid  to  such  new-made  and  purely  imaginary 
gods  as  had  previously  been  paid  to  the  whole  host  of 


MYTHOLOGY  UNESSENTIAL. 


37 


(    .    ■ 


// 

I  I 


gods  evolved  from  personal  and  tribal  ancestors.  It  is 
the  first  step  that  costs  :  once  you  have  got  the  idea  of  a 
god  fairly  evolved,  any  number  of  extra  gods  may  be  in- 
vented or  introduced  from  all  quarters.  A  great  pan- 
theon readily  admits  new  members  to  its  ranks  from  many 
strange  sources.  Familiar  instances  in  one  of  the  best- 
known  pantheons  are  those  of  Concordia,  Pecunia,  Aius 
Locutius,  Rediculus  Tutanus.  The  Romans,  indeed, 
deified  every  conceivable  operation  of  nature  or  of  human 
life  ;  they  had  gods  or  goddesses  for  the  minutest  details 
of  agriculture,  of  social  relations,  of  the  first  years  of  child- 
hood, of  marriage  and  domestic  arrangements  generally. 
Many  of  their  deities,  as  we  shall  see  hert  after,  were  ob- 
viously manufactured  to  meet  a  special  demand  on  special 
occasions.  But  at  the  same  time,  none  of  these  gods,  so 
far  as  we  can  judge,  could  ever  have  come  to  exist  at  all 
if  the  ghost-theory  and  ancestor-worship  had  not  already 
made  familiar  to  the  human  mind  the  principles  and  prac- 
tice of  religion  generally.  The  very  idea  of  a  god  could 
not  otherwise  have  been  evolved  ;  though,  when  once 
evolved,  any  number  of  new  beings  could  readily  be  af- 
filiated upon  it  by  the  human  imagination. 

Still,  to  admit  that  other  elements  have  afterwards  come 
in  to  confuse  religion  is  quite  a  dififerent  thing  from  ad- 
mitting that  religion  itself  has  more  than  one  origin. 
Whatever  gives  us  the  key  to  the  practice  of  worship  gives 
us  the  key  to  all  real  religion.  Now,  one  may  read 
through  almost  any  books  of  the  mythological  school 
without  ever  coming  upon  a  single  word  that  throws  one 
ray  of  light  upon  the  origin  of  religion  itself  thus  properly 
called.  To  trace  the  development  of  this,  that,  or  the 
other  story  or  episode  in  a  religious  myth  is  in  itself  a  very 
valuable  study  in  human  evolution  :  but  no  amount  of 
tracing  such  stories  ever  gives  us  the  faintest  clue  to  the 
question  why  men  worshipped  Osiris,  Zeus,  Siva,  or 
Venus  ;  why  they  offered  up  prayer  and  praise  to  Isis,  or  to 
Artemis  ;  why  they  made  sacrifices  of  oxen  to  Capitolian 


fl 


38 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


I 


t>  r' 


Jove  at  Rome,  or  slew  turtle-doves  on  the  altar  of  Jahweh, 
^od  of  Israel,  at  Jerusalem.  The  ghost-theory  and  the 
practice  of  ancestor-worship  show  us  a  natural  basis  and 
genesis  for  all  these  customs,  and  explain  them  in  a  way 
to  which  no  mythological  enquiry  can  add  a  single  item 
of  fundamental  interest. 

It  may  be  well  at  this  point  to  attempt  beforehand  some 
slight  provisional  disentanglement  of  the  various  extra- 
neous elements  which  interweave  themselves  at  last  with 
the  simple  primitive  fabric  of  practical  religion. 

In  the  first  place,  there  is  the  mythological  element. 
The  mythopceic  faculty  is  a  reality  in  mankind.  Stories 
arise,  grow,  gather  episodes  with  movement,  transform  and 
transmute  themselves,  wander  far  in  space,  get  corrupted 
by  time,  in  ten  thousand  ways  sufifer  change  and  modifica- 
tion. Now,  such  stories  sometimes  connect  themselves 
with  living  men  and  women.  Everybody  knows  how  many 
myths  exist  even  in  our  own  day  about  every  prominent 
or  peculiar  person.  They  also  gather  more  particularly 
round  the  memory  of  the  dead,  and  especially  of  any  very 
distinguished  dead  man  or  woman.  Sometimes  they  take 
their  rise  in  genuine  tradition,  sometimes  they  are  pure 
fetches  of  fancy  or  of  the  romancing  faculty.  The  ghosts 
or  the  gods  are  no  less  exempt  from  these  mythopceic 
freaks  than  other  people  ;  and  as  gods  go  on  living  in- 
definitely, they  have  plenty  of  time  for  myths  to  gather 
about  them.  Most  often,  a  myth  is  invented  to  account 
for  some  particular  religious  ceremony.  Again,  myths 
demonstrably  older  than  a  particular  human  being — say 
Caesar,  Virgil,  Arthur,  Charlemagne — may  get  fitted  by 
later  ages  to  those  special  personalities.  The  same  thing 
often  happens  also  with  gods.  Myth  comes  at  last,  in 
short,  to  be  the  history  of  the  gods  ;  and  a  personage 
about  whom  many  myths  exist,  whether  real  or  imaginary, 
a  personification  of  nature  or  an  abstract  quality,  may 
grow  in  time  to  be  practically  a  divine  being,  and  even 
perhaps  to  receive  worship,  the  final  test  of  divinity. 


RELIGION  AND  ETHICS  UNRELATED. 


39 


Again,  my^hs  about  the  gods  come  in  the  long  run,  in 
many  cases,  to  be  written  down,  especially  by  the  priests, 
and  themselves  acquire  a  considerable  degree  of  adventi- 
tious holiness.  Thus  we  get  Sacred  Books  ;  and  in  most 
advanced  races,  the  sacred  books  tend  to  become  an  im- 
portant integral  part  of  religion,  and  a  test  of  the  purity 
of  tenets  or  ceremonial.  But  sacred  books  almost  always 
contain  rude  cosmological  guesses  and  a  supernatural  cos- 
mogony, as  well  as  tales  about  the  doings,  relationships, 
and  prerogatives  of  the  gods.  Such  early  philosophical 
conjectures  come  then  to  be  intimately  bound  up  with  the 
idea  of  religion,  and  in  many  cases  even  to  supersede  in 
certain  minds  its  true,  practical,  central  kernel.  The  ex- 
treme of  this  tendency  is  seen  in  English  Protestant  Dis- 
senting Bibliolatry. 

Rationalistic  and  reconciliatory  glosses  tend  to  arise 
with  advancing  culture.  Attempts  are  made  to  trace  the 
pedigree  and  mutual  relations  of  the  gods,  and  to  get  rid 
of  discrepancies  in  earlier  legends.  The  Theogony  of 
Hesiod  is  a  definite  effort  undertaken  in  this  direction  for 
the  Greek  pantheon.  Often  the  attempt  is  made  by  the 
most  learned  and  philosophically-minded  among  the 
priests,  and  results  in  a  quasi-philosophical  mythology  like 
that  of  the  Brahmans.  In  the  monotheistic  or  half-mono- 
theistic religions,  this  becomes  theology.  In  proportion 
as  it  grows  more  and  more  laboured  and  definite  the  at- 
tention of  the  learned  and  tlie  priestly  class  is  more  and 
more  directed  to  dogma,  creed,  faith,  abstract  formulae  of 
philosophical  or  intellectual  belief,  while  insisting  also 
upon  ritual  or  practice.  But  the  popular  religion  remains 
usually,  as  in  India,  a  religion  of  practical  custom  and  ob- 
servances alone,  having  very  little  relation  to  the  highly 
abstract  theological  ideas  of  the  learned  or  the  priestly. 

Lastly,  in  the  highest  religions,  a  large  element  of  ethics, 
of  sentiment,  of  broad  humanitarianism,  of  adventitious 
emotion,  is  allowed  to  come  in,  often  to  the  extent  of  ob- 
scuring the  original  factors  of  practice  and  observance. 


40 


RELIGION  AND  MYTHOLOGY. 


f  ii 


We  are  constantly  taught  that  "  real  religion "  means 
many  things  which  have  nothing  on  earth  to  do  with  re- 
ligion proper,  in  any  sense,  but  are  merely  high  morality, 
tinctured  by  emotional  devotion  towa*"Js  a  spiritual  being 
or  set  of  beings. 

Owing  to  all  these  causes,  modern  investigators,  in 
searching  for  the  origin  of  religion,  are  apt  to  mix  up  with 
it,  even  when  dealing  with  savage  tribes,  many  extraneous 
questions  of  cosmology,  cosmogony,  philosophy,  meta- 
physics, ethics,  and  mythology.  They  do  not  sufificiently 
see  that  the  true  question  narrows  itself  down  at  last  to 
two  prime  factors — worship  and  sacrifice.  In  all  early  re- 
ligions, the  practice  is  at  a  maximum,  and  the  creed  at  a 
minimum.  We,  nowadays,  look  back  upon  these  early 
cults,  which  were  cults  and  little  else,  with  minds  warped 
by  modern  theological  prejudices — by  constant  wrang- 
ling over  dogmas,  clauses,  definitions,  and  formtUaries. 
We  talk  glibly  of  the  Hindu  faith  or  the  Chine  >elief, 
when  we  ought  rather  to  talk  of  the  Hindu  practi«  .  the 
Chinese  observances.  By  thus  wrongly  conceiving  the 
nature  of  religion,  we  go  astray  as  to  its  origin.  We  shall 
only  get  right  again  when  we  learn  to  separate  mythology 
entirely  from  religion,  and  when  we  recognise  that  the 
growth  and  development  of  the  myth  have  nothing  at  all 
to  do  with  the  beginnings  of  worship.  The  science  of 
comparative  mythology  and  folk-lore  is  a  valuable  and 
light-bearing  study  in  its  own  way  :  but  it  has  no  more  to 
do  with  the  origin  of  religion  than  the  science  of  ethics  or 
the  science  of  geology.  There  are  ethical  rules  in  most 
advanced  cults  :  there  are  geological  surmises  in  most 
sacred  books  :  but  neither  one  nor  the  other  is  on  that 
account  religion,  any  more  than  the  history  of  Jehoshaphat 
or  the  legend  of  Samson. 

What  I  want  to  suggest  in  the  present  chapter  sums  it- 
self up  in  a  few  sentences  thus  :  Religion  is  practice,  my- 
thology is  story-telling.  Every  religion  hp>  myths  that 
accompany  it  :  but  the  myths  do  not  give  rise  to  the  re- 


■'4 


\    % 


RELIGIOUS  MYTHS. 


41 


Hgion  :  on  the  contrary,  the  religion  gives  rise  to  the 
myths.  And  I  shall  attempt  in  this  book  to  account  for 
the  origin  of  rehgion  alone,  omitting  altogether  both  my- 
thology as  a  whole,  and  all  mythical  persons  or  beings 
other  than  gods  in  the  sense  here  illustrated. 


■HMH! 


rN;i'     \ 


42 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


CHAPTER  III. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


Ii 


The  object  of  this  book,  we  saw  at  the  beginning,  is  to 
trace  the  evokition  of  the  idea  of  God.  But  the  sokition 
of  that  problem  implies  two  separate  questions — first,  how 
did  men  begin  to  frame  the  idea  of  a  god  at  all  ;  and 
second,  how  did  they  progress  from  the  conception  of 
many  distinct  gods  to  the  conception  of  a  single  supreme 
God,  like  the  central  deity  of  Christianity  and  of  Islam. 
In  other  words,  we  have  first  to  enquire  into  the  origin  of 
polytheism,  and  next  into  its  gradual  supersession  by 
monotheism.  Those  are  the  main  lines  of  enquiry  I  pro- 
pose to  follow  out  in  the  present  volume. 

Religion,  however,  has  one  element  within  it  still  older, 
more  fundamental,  and  more  persistent  than  any  mere  be- 
lief in  a  god  or  gods — nay,  even  than  the  custom  or  prac- 
tice of  supplicating  and  appeasing  ghosts  or  gods  by  gifts  , 
and  observances.  That  element  is  the  conception  of  the  Life  h 
of  the  Dead.     On  the  primitive  belief  in  such  Hfe,  all  reli-  | 
gion  ultimately  bases  itself.  The  belief  is  in  fact  the  earliest  ]\ 
thing  to  appear  in  religion,  for  there  are  savage  tribes  who 
have  nothing  worth  calling  gods,  but  have  still  a  religion 
or  cult  of  their  dead  relatives.     It  is  also  the  latest  thing 
to  survive  in  religion;  for  many  modern  spiritualists,  who 
have  ceased  to  be  theists,  or  to  accept  any  other  form  of 
the  supernatural,  nevertheless  go  on  believing  in  the  con- 
tinued existence  of  the  dead,  and  in  the  possibility  of  inter- 
communication  between    them   and    the    living.      This, 
therefore,  which  is  the  earliest  manifestatioh  of  religious 


I 


I 


f 


...  .  V. 


/ 


THREE  STAGES  IiV  THE  BELIEF. 


43 


1 


thought,  and  which  persists  throughout  as  one  of  its  most 
sahent  and  irrepressible  features,  must  engage  our  atten- 
tion for  a  little  time  before  we  pass  on  to  the  genesis  of 
polytheism. 

But  the  belief  in  continued  life  itself,  like  all  other  hu- 
man ideas,   has  naturally  undergone  various   stages   of 
evolution.      The    stages    glide    imperceptibly    into    one 
another,  of  course  ;    but  I  think  we  can  on  the  whole  dis- 
tinguish with  tolerable  accuracy  between  three  main  layers 
or  strata  of  opinion  with  regard  to  the  continued  existence 
of  the  dead.     In  the  first  or  lowest  stratum,  the  difference 
between  life  and  death  themselves  is  but  ill  or  inadequately 
perceived;  the  dead  are  thought  of  as  yet  bodily  Hving. 
In  the  second  stratum,  death  is  recognised  as  a  physical 
fact,  but  is  regarded  as  only  temporary;  at  this  stage,  men 
look  forward  to  the  Resurrection  of  the  Body,  and  expect 
the  Life  of  the  World  to  Come.     In  the  third  stratum,  the 
soul  is  regarded  as  a  distinct  entity  from  the  body;  it  sur- 
vives it  in  a  separate  and  somewhat  shadowy  form:'  so  that 
the  opinion  as  to  the  future  proper  to  this  stage  is  not  a 
belief  in  the  Resurrection  of  the  Body,  but  a  belief  in  the 
Immortality  of  the  Soul.     These  two  concepts  have  often 
been  confounded  together  by  loose  and  semi-philosophical 
Christian  thinkers  ;    but  in  their  essence  they  are  wholly 
distinct  and  irreconcilable. 

I  shall  examine  each  of  these  three  strata  separately. 
And  first  as  to  that  early  savage  level  of  thought  where 
the  ideas  of  life  and  death  are  very  ill  demarcated.  To  us 
at  the  present  day  it  seems  a  curious  notion  that  people 
should  not  possess  the  conception  of  death  as  a  necessary 
event  in  every  individual  human  history.  But  that  is 
because  we  cannot  easily  unread  all  our  previous  thinking, 
cannot  throw  ourselves  frankly  back  into  the  state  of  the 
savage.  We  are  accustomed  to  living  in  large  and  popu- 
ous  communities,  where  deaths  are  frequent,  and  where 
natural  death  in  particular  is  an  every-day  occurrence.  We 
have  behind  us  a  vast  and  long  history  of  previous  ages  ; 


•Mf.r  " 


44 


THE  LIFE  OF   THE  DEAD. 


W 


and  we  know  that  historical  time  was  occupied  by  the  lives 
of  many  successive  generations,  all  of  which  are  now  dead, 
and  none  of  which  on  the  average  exceeded  a  certain 
fixed  limit  of  seventy  or  eighty  odd  years.  To  us,  the  con- 
ception of  human  life  as  a  relatively  short  period,  bounded 
by  a  known  duration,  and  naturally  terminating  at  a  rela- 
tively fixed  end,  is  a  common  and  familiar  one. 

We  forget,  however,  that  to  the  savage  all  this  is  quite 
otherwise.  He  lives  in  a  small  and  scattered  community, 
where  deaths  are  rare,  and  where  natural  death  in  particu- 
lar is  comparatively  infrequent.  Most  of  his  people  are 
killed  in  war,  or  devoured  by  wild  beasts,  or  destroyed 
by  accidents  in  the  chase,  or  by  thirst  or  starvation. 
Some  are  drowned  in  rapid  rivers ;  some  crushed  by  falling 
trees  or  stones;  some  poisoned  by  deadly  fruits,  or  bitten 
by  venomous  snakes;  some  massacred  by  chiefs,  or  mur- 
dered in  quarrels  with  their  own  tribesmen.  In  a  large 
majority  of  instances,  there  is  some  open  and  obvious 
cause  of  death;  and  this  cause  is  generally  due  either  to 
the  hand  of  man  or  to  some  other  animal;  or  failing  that, 
to  some  apparently  active  efifort  of  external  nature,  such  as 
flood,  or  lightning,  or  forest  fires,  or  landslip  and  earth- 
quake. Death  by  disease  is  comparatively  rare;  death  by 
natural  decay  almost  unknown  or  unrecognised. 

Nor  has  the  savage  a  great  historic  past  behind  him. 
He  knows  few  but  his  tribesmen,  and  little  of  their  an- 
cestors save  those  whom  his  parents  can  remember  before 
them.  His  perspective  of  the  past  is  extremely  limited. 
Nothing  enables  him  to  form  that  wide  idea  of  the  neces- 
sity and  invariability  of  death  which  to  us  is  so  familiar. 
That  "  all  men  are  mortal "  is  to  civilised  man  a  truism; 
to  very  early  savages  it  would  necessarily  have  seemed 
a  startling  paradox.  No  man  ever  dies  within  his  own 
experience;  ever  since  he  can  remember,  he  has  continued 
to  exist  as  a  permanent  part  of  all  his  adventures.  Most 
of  the  savage's  family  have  gone  on  continuously  living 
with  him.     A  death  has  been  a  rare  and  startling  occur- 


I 


/ 


PRIMITIVE  MAN  AND  DEATH. 


45 


rence.  Thus  the  notion  of  death  as  an  inevitable  end 
never  arises  at  all  ;  the  notion  of  death  as  due  to  natural 
causes  seems  quite  untenable.  When  a  savage  dies,  the  first 
question  that  arises  is  "  Who  has  killed  him  ? "  If  he  is 
slain  in  war,  or  devoured  by  a  tiger,  or  ripped  up  by  an  ele- 
phant, or  drowned  by  a  stream  in  spate,  or  murdered  by  a 
tribesman,  the  cause  is  obvious.  If  none  of  these,  then 
the  death  is  usually  set  down  to  witchcraft. 

Furthermore,  the  mere  fact  of  death  is  much  less  certain 
among  primitive  or  savage  men  than  in  civilised  communi- 
ties.    We  know  as  a  rule  with  almost  absolute  certainty 
whether  at  a  given  moment  a  sick  or  wounded  man  is  dead 
or  living.     Nevertheless,  even  among  ourselves,  cases  of 
doubt    not   infrequently    occur.      At    times   we    hesitate 
whether  a  man  or  woman  is  dead  or  has  fainted      If  the 
heart  continues  to  beat,  we  consider  them  still  living-  if 
not  the  slightest  flutter  of  the  pulse  can  be  perceived, 'we 
consider  them  dead.     Even  our  advanced  medical  science, 
however,  is  often  perplexed  in  very  obscure  cases  of  cata- 
lepsy; and  mistakes  have  occurred  from  time  to  time  re- 
sulting in  occasional  premature  burials.     The  discrim'ina- 
tion  of  true  from  apparent  death  is  not  always  easy.    Vesa- 
lius,  the  eminent  anatomist,  opened  a  supposed  corpse  in 
which  the  heart  was  seen  to  be  still  beating;  and  the  /\bbe 
Prevost,  who  had  been  struck  by  apoplexy,  was  regarded  as 
dead,  but  recovered  consciousness  once  more  under  the 
surgeon's  scalpel.     Naturally,  among  savages,  such  cases 
ot  doubt  are  far  more  likely  to  occur  than  among  civilised 
people;  or  rather,  to  put  it  as  the  savage  would  think  of  it, 
there  is  often  no  knowing  when  a  person  who  is  lying  stiff 
and    ifeless  may  happen  to  get  up  again  and  resume  his 
usual  activity.     The  savage  is  accustomed  to  seeing  his 
fellows    stunned    or    rendered    unconscious    by    blows 
wounds,  and  other  accidents,  inflicted  either  by  the  enemy' 
by  wild  beasts,  by  natural  agencies,  or  bv  the  wrath  of 
his  tribesmen;  and  he  never  knows  how  soon  the  effect 
of  such  accidents  may  pass  away,  and  the  man  may  recover 


46 


THE  LIFE  OF   THE  DEAD. 


m\ 


li 


r 


his  ordinary  vitality.  As  a  rule,  he  keeps  and  tends  the 
bodies  of  his  friends  as  long  as  any  chance  remains  of  their 
ultimate  recovery,  and  often  (as  we  shall  see  in  the  sequel) 
much  longer. 

Again,  in  order  to  understand  this  attitude  of  early  man 
towards  his  wounded,  his  stricken,  and  his  dead,  we  must 
glance  aside  for  a  moment  at  the  primitive  psychology. 
Very  early  indeed  in  the  history  of  the  human  mind,  I 
believe,  some  vague  adumbration  of  the  notion  of  a  soul 
began  to  pervade  humanity.  We  now  know  that  conscious- 
ness is  a  function  of  the  brain ;  that  it  is  intermitted  during 
sleep,  when  the  brain  rests,  and  also  during  times  of  grave 
derangement  of  the  nervous  or  circulatory  systems,  as  when 
we  faint  or  assume  the  comatose  condition,  or  are  stunned 
by  a  blow,  or  fall  into  catalepsy  or  epilepsy.  We  also 
know  that  consciousness  ceases  altogether  at  death,  when 
the  brain  no  longer  functions;  and  that  the  possibility  of 
its  further  continuance  is  absolutely  cut  off  by  the  fact  of 
decomposition.  But  these  truths,  still  imperfectly  under- 
stood or  rashly  rejected  by  many  among  ourselves,  were 
wholly  unknown  to  early  men.  They  had  to  frame  for 
themselves  as  best  they  could  some  vague  working  hy- 
pothesis of  the  human  mind,  from  data  which  suggested 
themselves  in  the  ordinary  course  of  life;  and  the  hypothe- 
sis which  they  framed  was  more  or  less  roughly  that  of 
the  soul  or  spirit,  still  implicitly  accepted  by  a  large  majo- 
rity of  the  human  species. 

According  to  this  hypothesis  every  man  consists  of  two 
halves  or  parts,  one  material  or  bodily,  the  other  imma- 
terial or  spiritual.  The  first  half,  called  the  body,  is  visible 
and  tangible  ;  the  second  half,  called  the  soul,  dwells 
within  it,  and  is  more  or  less  invisible  or  shadowy.  It  is  to 
a  large  extent  identified  with  the  breath  ;  and  like  the 
breath  it  is  often  believed  to  quit  the  body  at  death,  and 
even  to  go  off  in  a  free  form  and  live  its  own  life  elsewhere. 
As  this  supposed  independence  of  the  soul  from  the  body 
lies  at  the  very  basis  of  all  ghosts  and  gods,  and  therefore 


t 


I: 


I  \ 


I 


N    ) 


SAVAGE  CONCEPTION  OF  DEATH. 


47 


1 

.•J 

i':' 

■?6 


of  religion  itself,  I  may  be  excused  for  going  at  so^""": 
length  into  the  question  of  its  origin. 

Actually,  so  far  as  we  know  by  direct  and  trustworthy 
evidence,  the  existence  of  a  mind,  consciousness,  or 
"  soul,"  apart  from  a  body,  has  never  yet  been  satisfacto- 
rily demonstrated.  But  the  savage  derived  the  belief,  ap- 
parently, from  a  large  number  of  concurrent  hints  and 
suggestions,  of  which  such  a  hypothesis  seemed  to  him  the 
inevitable  result.  During  the  daytime  he  was  awake;  at 
night  he  slept;  yet  even  in  his  sleep,  while  his  body  lay 
curled  on  the  ground  beside  the  camp-fire,  he  seemed  to 
hunt  or  to  fight,  to  make  love  or  to  feast,  in  some  other 
region.  What  was  this  part  of  him  that  wandered  from 
the  body  in  dreams  ? — what,  if  not  the  soul  or  breath 
which  he  naturally  regarded  as  something  distinct  and 
separate  ?  And  when  a  man  died,  did  not  the  soul  or 
breath  go  from  him  ?  When  he  was  badly  wounded,  did 
it  not  disappear  for  a  time,  and  then  return  again  ?  In 
fainting  fits,  in  catalepsy,  and  in  other  abnormal  states,  did 
it  not  leave  the  body,  or  even  play  strange  tricks  with  it  ? 
I  need  not  pursue  this  line  of  thought,  already  fully  worked 
out  by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  and  Dr.  Tylor.  It  is  enough 
to  say  that  from  a  very  early  date,  primitive  man  began  to 
regard  the  soul  or  life  as  something  bound  up  with  the 
breath,  something  which  could  go  away  from  the  body  at 
will  and  return  to  it  again,  something  separable  and  dis- 
tinct, yet  essential  to  the  person,  very  vaguely  conceived 
as  immaterial  or  shadowy,  but  more  so  at  a  later  than  at 
an  earlier  period.* 

Moreover,  these  souls  or  spirits  (which  quitted  the  body 
in  sleep  or  trance)  outlived  death,  and  appeared  again  to 
survivors.  In  dreams,  we  often  see  the  shapes  of  living 
men  ;  but  we  also  see  with  peculiar  vividness  the  images 
of  the  departed.     Everybody  is  familiar  with  the  frequent 


*The  question  of  the  Separate  Soul  has  recently  received  very  full 
treatment  from  Mr.  Frazer  in  TAe  Golden  Bough,  and  Mr.  Sidney 
Hartland  in  The  Legend  of  Perseus. 


48 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


reappearance  in  sleep  of  intimate  friends  or  relations 
lately  deceased.  These  appearances,  I  fancy,  are  espe- 
cially frequent  during-  the  first  few  months  of  bereavement, 
and  gradually  weaken  in  frequency  and  vividness  as  time 
goes  on.  The  reason  for  both  sets  of  phenomena  I  take 
to  be  this  :  the  nervous  structures,  accustomed  to  be 
stimulated  in  par^^icular  combinations  by  intercourse  with 
the  dead  friend,  miss  automatically  their  wonted  stimula- 
tion; and  being  therefore  in  a  highly  nourished  and  un- 
stable state,  are  peculiarly  ready  to  undergo  ideal  stimula- 
tion in  sleep,  as  we  know  to  be  the  case  with  other  well- 
nurtured  and  underworked  nerve-centres.  Or,  to  put  it 
less  materially,  the  brain  falls  readily  into  a  familiar 
rhythm.  But  in  course  of  time  the  channels  atrophy  by 
disuse;  the  habit  is  lost;  and  the  dream-appearances  of  the 
dead  friend  grow  more  and  more  infrequent.  The  savage, 
however,  accepts  the  dream-world  as  almost  equally  real 
with  the  world  of  sense-presentation.  As  he  envisages  the 
matter  to  himself,  his  soul  has  been  away  on  its  travels 
without  its  body,  and  there  has  met  and  conversed  with 
the  souls  of  dead  friends  or  relations. 

We  must  remember  also  that  in  savage  life  occasions 
for  trance,  for  fainting,  and  for  other  abnormal  or  comatose 
nervous  conditions  occur  far  more  frequently  than  in  civi- 
lised life.  The  savage  is  often  wounded  and  fails  from  loss 
of  blood;  he  cuts  his  foot  against  a  stone,  or  is  half  killed 
by  a  wild  beast ;  he  fasts  long  and  often,  perforce,  or  is  re- 
duced to  the  very  verge  of  starvation;  and  he  is  therefore 
familiar,  both  in  his  own  case  and  in  the  case  of  others, 
with  every  variety  of  unconsciousness  and  of  delirium  or 
delusion.  All  these  facts  figure  themselves  to  his  mind  as 
absences  of  the  soul  from  the  body,  which  is  thus  to  him  a 
famiHar  and  almost  every-day  experience. 

Moreover,  it  will  hence  result  that  the  savage  can  hardly 
gain  any  clear  conception  of  Death,  and  especially  of 
death  from  natural  causes.  When  a  tribesman  is  brought 
home  severely  wounded  and  unconscious,  the  spectator's 


I 


!    ^ 


Vv^ 


n 


^ 


..^' 


•  .«••■■ 


frV^ 


THE  PRESERVATION  OF  THE  CORPSE. 


49 


t    k' 


immediate  idea  must  necessarily  be  that  the  soul  has  gone 
away  and  deserted  the  body.     For  how  long  it  has  gone, 
he  cannot  tell;  but  his  first  attempts  are  directed  towards 
inducing  or  compelling   it  to  return  again.      For  this 
purpose,  he  often  addresses  it  with  prayers  and  adjura- 
tions, or  begs  it  to  come  back  with  loud  cries  and  per- 
suasions.    And  he  cannot  possibly  discriminate  between 
its  temporary  absence  and  its  final  departure.      As  Mr. 
Herbert  Spencer  well  says,  the  consequences  of  blows  or 
wounds  merge  into  death  by  imperceptible  stages.    "  Now 
the  injured  man  shortly  '  returned  to  himself,'  and  did  not 
go  away  again;  and  now,  returning  to  himself  only  after  a 
long  absence,  he  presently  deserted  his  body  for  an  in- 
definite time.     Lastly,  instead  of  these  temporary  returns, 
followed  by  final  absence,  there  sometimes  occurred  cases 
in  which  a  violent  blow  caused  continuous  absence  from 
the  very  first;  the  other  self  never  came  back  at  all." 

In  point  of  fact,  during  these  earlier  stages,  the  idea  of 
Death  as  we  know  it  did  not  and  does  not  occur  in  any 
form.  There  are  still  savages  who  do  not  seem  to  recog- 
nise the  universality  and  necessity  of  death — who  regard  it 
on  the  contrary  as  something  strange  and  unatural,  some- 
thing due  to  the  machination  of  enemies  or  of  witchcraft. 
With  the  earliest  men,  it  is  a  foregone  conclusion,  psycho- 
logically speaking,  that  they  should  so  regard  it;  they  could 
not  form  any  other  concept  without  far  more  extended 
knowledge  than  they  have  the  means  of  possessing.  To 
them,  a  Dead  Man  must  always  have  seemed  a  man 
whose  soul  or  breath  or  other  self  had  left  him,  but  might 
possibly  return  again  to  the  body  at  any  time. 

Each  of  the  three  stages  of  thought  above  discriminated 
has  its  appropriate  mode  of  disposing  of  its  dead.  The 
appropriate  mode  for  this  earliest  stage  is  Preservation  of 
the  Corpse,  which  eventuates  at  last  in  Mummification. 

The  simplest  form  of  this  mode  of  disposal  of  the  corpse 
consists  in  keeping  it  in  the  hut  or  cave  where  the  family 
dwell,  together  with  the  living.     A  New  Guinea  woman 


50 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


I  I 


i. 


1: 


thus  kept  her  husband's  body  in  her  hut  till  it  dried  up  of 
itself,  and  she  kissed  it  and  offered  it  food  every  day,  as 
though  it  were  living.  Many  similar  cases  are  reported 
from  elsewhere.  Hut  preservation  is  common  in  the  very 
lowest  races.  More  frequently,  however,  owing  to  the 
obvious  discomfort  of  living  in  too  close  proximity  to  a 
dead  body,  the  corpse  at  this  stage  of  thought  is  exposed 
openly  in  a  tree  or  on  a  platform  or  under  some  other 
circumstances  where  no  harm  can  come  to  it.  Among  the 
Australians  and  Andaman  Islanders,  who,  like  the  Negri- 
toes of  New  Guinea,  preserve  for  us  a  very  early  type  of 
human  customs,  the  corpse  is  often  exposed  on  a  rough 
raised  scaffold.  Some  of  the  Polynesian  and  Melanesian 
peoples  follow  the  same  practice.  The  Dyaks  and  Kyans 
expose  their  dead  in  trees.  "  But  it  is  in  America,"  says 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  "  that  exposure  on  raised  stages  is 
commonest.  The  Dakotahs  adopt  this  method;  at  one 
time  it  was  the  practice  of  the  Iriquois;  Catlin,  describing 
the  Mandans  as  having  scaffolds  on  which  *  their  dead  live 
as  they  term  it,'  remarks  that  they  are  thus  kept  out  of 
the  way  of  wolves  and  dogs  ;  and  Schoolcraft  says  the 
same  of  the  Chippewas."  Generally  speaking,  at  the  low- 
est grades  of  culture,  savages  preserve  the  actual  bodies  of 
their  dead  above  ground,  either  in  the  home  itself,  or  in 
close  proximity  to  it.  We  shall  recur  later  on  to  this  sin- 
gular practice. 

A  slight  variant  on  this  method,  peculiar  to  a  very  mari- 
time race,  is  that  described  by  Mr.  H.  O.  Forbes  among 
the  natives  of  Timurlaut: 

"  The  dead  body  is  placed  in  a  portion  of  a  praii  fitted 
to  the  length  of  the  individual,  or  within  strips  of  gaba- 
gaba,  or  stems  of  the  sago-palm  pinned  together.  If  it  is  a 
person  of  some  consequence,  such  as  an  Orang  Kaya,  an 
ornate  and  decorated  /raw-shaped  coffin  is  specially  made. 
This  is  then  enveloped  in  calico,  and  placed  either  on  the 
top  of  a  rock  by  the  margin  of  the  sea  at  a  short  distance 
from  the  village,  or  on  a  high  pile-platform  erected  on  the 


^ 


j     f .,  ,^v:J^'-«  ^^^''^ 


I 


f. 

--     iJ/"^'  .•   J^J^ORTANCE  OF  THE  SKULL.  gj 

shore  about  low-tide  mark.     On  the  top  of  the  coffin-lid 
are  erected  tall  flags,  and  the  figures  of  men  playing 
^  gongs,  shooting  guns,  and  gesticulating  wildly  to  frighten 

I  away  evil  influences  from  the  sleeper.     Sometimes  the 

I  platform  is  erected  on  the  shore  above  high-water  mark, 

and  near  it  is  stuck  in  the  ground  a  tall  bamboo  full  of 
palm-wine  ;  and  suspended  over  a  bamboo  rail  are 
bunches  of  sweet  potatoes  for  the  use  of  the  dead  man's 
Nitu.  When  the  body  is  quite  decomposed,  his  son  or  one 
of  the  family  disinters  the  skull  and  deposits  it  on  a  little 
platform  in  his  house,  in  the  gable  opposite  the  fireplace, 
while  to  ward  off  evil  from  himself  he  carries  about  with 
him  the  atlas  and  axis  bones  of  its  neck  in  his  luon,  or  sin- 
holder:' 

This  interesting  account  is  full  of  implications  whose 
fuller  meaning  we  will  perceive  hereafter.  The  use  of  the 
skull  and  of  the  talisman  bone  should  especially  be  noted 
for  their  later  importance.  For  skulls  are  fundamental  in 
the  history  of  religion. 

Cases  like  these  readily  pass  into  the  practice  of  Mum- 
mifying, more  especially  in  dry  or  desert  climates.  Even 
in  so  damp  a  tropical  country  as  New  Guinea,  however, 
D'Albertis  found  in  a  shed  on  the  banks  of  the  Fly  River 
two  mummies,  artificially  prepared,  as  he  thought,  by  re- 
moval of  the  flesh,  the  bones  alone  being  preserved  with  the 
skin  to  cover  them.  Here  we  have  evidently  a  clear  con- 
ception of  death  as  a  serious  change,  of  a  different  charac- 
ter from  a  mere  temporary  absence.  So,  too,  Mr.  Chal- 
mers says  of  the  Koiari  people  in  the  same  island,  "  They 
I    I  treat  their  dead  after  this  fashion.     A  fire  is  kept  burning 

i    f  day  and  night  at  the  head  and  feet  for  months.     The  en- 

^    I  tire  skin  is  removed  by  means  of  the  thumb  and  forefinger, 

J  and  the  juices  plastered  all  over  the  face  and  body  of  the 

operator  (parent,  husband,  or  wife  of  the  deceased).  The 
fire  gradually  desiccates  the  flesh,  so  that  little  more  than 
the  skeleton  is  left."  But  mummification  for  the  most 
part  is  confined  to  drier  climates,  where  it  is  artificially 


;^l' 


52 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


h 


it  I 


I 


;i 


•   v// 


performed  down  to  a  very  evolved  stage  of  civilisation,  as 
we  know  well  in  Peru  and  Egypt. 

One  word  must  be  said  in  passing  as  to  the  frequent 
habit  of  specially  preserving,  and  even  carrying  about  the 
person,  the  head  or  hand  of  a  deceased  relative.  This  has 
been  already  mentioned  in  the  case  of  Timurlaut  ;  and  it 
occurs  frequently  elsewhere.  Thus  Mr.  Chalmers  says  of 
a  New  Guinea  baby:  "  It  will  be  covered  with  two  inches 
of  soil,  the  friends  watching  beside  the  grave;  but  eventu- 
ally the  skull  and  smaller  bones  will  be  preserved  and 
worn  by  the  mother."  Similarly,  in  the  Andaman  Islands, 
where  we  touch  perhaps  the  lowest  existing  stratum  of 
savage  feeling,  "  widows  may  be  seen  with  the  skulls  of 
their  deceased  partners  suspended  round  their  necks." 
The  special  preservation  of  the  head,  even  when  the  rest 
of  the  body  is  eaten  or  buried,  will  engage  our  attention  at 
a  later  period:  heads  so  preserved  are  usually  resorted  to 
as  oracles,  and  are  often  treated  as  the  home  of  the  spirit. 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  has  collected  many  similar  instances, 
such  as  that  of  the  Tasmanians  who  wore  a  bone  from  the 
skull  or  arm  of  a  dead  relation.  He  rightly  notes,  too, 
that  throughout  the  New  World  "  the  primitive  concep- 
tion of  death  as  a  long-suspended  animation  seems  to  have 
been  especially  vivid;"  and  we  find  accordingly  that  cus- 
toms of  this  character  are  particularly  frequent  among 
American  savages.  Thus,  to  draw  once  more  from  his 
great  storehouse,  the  Crees  carried  bones  and  hair  of  dead 
relations  about  for  three  years  ;  while  the  Caribs  and 
several  Guiana  tribes  distributed  the  clean  bones  among 
the  kinsmen  of  the  deceased.  In  the  Sandwich  Islands, 
also,  bones  of  kings  and  chiefs  were  carried  about  by  their 
descendants,  under  the  impression  that  the  dead  exercised 
guardianship  over  them. 
.  • —  At  this  stage  of  thought,  it  seems  to  me,  it  is  the  actual 
n  corpse  that  is  still  thought  to  be  alive;  the  actual  corpse 
that  appears  in  dreams;  and  the  actual  corpse  that  is  fed 
and  worshipped  and  propitiated  with  presents. 


'I 


CAVE-BURIAL. 


53 


Ceremonial  cannibalism,  which  will  be  more  fully  con- 
sidered hereafter,  appears  in  this  stratum,  and  survives 
from  it  into  higher  levels.  The  body  is  eaten  entire,  and 
the  bones  preserved;  or  the  flesh  and  fat  are  removed,  and 
the  skin  left;  or  a  portion  only  is  sacramentally  and  reve- 
rently eaten  by  the  surviving  relations.  These  processes 
also  will  be  more  minutely  described  in  the  sequel. 

The  first  stage  merges  by  gradual  degrees  into  the 
second,  which  is  that  of  Burial  or  its  equivalent.  Cave- 
burial  of  mummies  or  of  corpses  forms  the  transitional 
link.  Indeed,  inasmuch  as  many  races  of  primitive  men 
lived  habitually  in  caves,  the  placing  or  leaving  the  corpse 
in  a  cave  seems  much  the  same  thing  as  the  placing  or 
leaving  it  in  a  shed,  hut,  or  shelter.  The  cave-dwelling 
Veddahs  simply  left  the  dead  man  in  the  cave  where  he 
died,  and  themselves  migrated  to  some  other  cavern. 
Still,  cave-burial  lingered  on  late  with  many  tribes  or 
nations  which  had  for  ages  outlived  the  habit  of  cave-dwell- 
ing. Among  the  South  American  Indians,  cave-burial 
was  common;  and  in  Peru  it  assumed  high  developments 
of  mummification.  The  making  of  an  artificial  cave  or 
vault  for  the  dead  is  but  a  slight  variant  on  this  custom; 
it  was  frequent  in  Egypt,  the  other  dry  country  where  the 
making  of  mummies  was  carried  to  a  high  pitch  of  perfec- 
tion. The  Tombs  of  the  Kings  at  Thebes  are  splendid 
instances  of  such  artificial  caves,  elaborated  into  stately 
palaces  with  painted  walls,  where  the  dead  monarchs 
might  pass  their  underground  life  in  state  and  dignity. 
Cave-tombs,  natural  or  artificial,  are  also  common  in  Asia 
Minor,  Italy,  and  elsewhere. 

During  the  first  stage,  it  may  be  noted,  the  attitude  of 
man  towards  his  dead  is  chiefly  one  of  affectionate  regard. 
The  corpse  is  kept  at  home,  and  fed  or  tended;  the  skull 
is  carried  about  as  a  beloved  object.  But  in  the  second 
stage,  which  induces  the  practice  of  burial,  a  certain  Fear 
of  the  Dead  becomes  more  obviously  apparent.  Men 
dread  the  return  of  the  corpse  or  the  ghos^,  and  strive  to 


54 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


h  i; 


»; 


keep  it  within  prescribed  limits.  In  this  stage,  the  belief 
in  the  Resurrection  of  the  Body  is  the  appropriate  creed; 
and  though  at  first  the  actual  corpse  is  regarded  as  likely 
to  return  to  plague  survivors,  that  idea  gives  place  a  little 
later,  I  believe,  to  the  conception  of  a  less  material  double 
or  spirit. 

And  here  let  us  begin  by  discriminating  carefully  be- 
tween the  Resurrection  of  the  Body  and  the  Immortality 
of  the  Soul. 

The  idea  of  Resurrection  arose  from  and  is  closely 
bound  up  with  the  practice  of  burial,  the  second  and  sim- 
pler mode  of  disposing  of  the  remains  of  the  dead.  The 
idea  of  Immortality  arose  from  and  is  closely  bound  up 
with  the  practice  of  burning,  a  later  and  better  innovation, 
invented  at  the  third  stage  of  human  culture.  During  the 
early  historical  period  all  the  most  advanced  and  cultivated 
nations  burnt  their  dead,  and,  in  consequence,  accepted 
the  more  ideal  and  refined  notion  of  Immortality.  But 
modern  European  nations  bury  their  dead,  and,  in  conse- 
quence, accept,  nominally  at  Icr^st,  the  cruder  and  grosser 
notion  of  Resurrection.  Nominally,  I  say,  because,  in 
spite  of  creeds  and  formularies,  the  influence  of  Plato  and 
other  ancic.it  tliinkers,  as  well  as  of  surviving  ancestral 
ideas,  has  made  most  educated  Earcpv^ans  really  believe  in 
Immortality,  even  wnen  they  imagine  themselves  to  be  be- 
lieving in  Resurrection.  Nevertheless,  the  belief  in  Resur- 
rection is  the  avowed  and  authoritative  belief  of  the  Chris- 
tian world,  which  thus  proclaims  itself  as  on  a  lower  level 
in  this  respect  than  the  civilised  peoples  of  antiquity. 

The  earliest  of  these  two  ways  of  disposing  of  the  bodies 
of  the  dead  is  certainly  by  burial.  As  this  fact  has  'ecently 
been  called  in  question,  I  will  venture  to  enlarge  a  little 
upon  the  evidence  in  its  favour.  In  poi.it  of  time,  burial 
goes  back  with  certainty  to  the  neolithic  age,  and  with 
some  probability  to  the  palaeolithic.  Several  true  inter- 
ments in  caves  have  been  attributed  by  competent  geolo- 
gists to  the  earlier  of  these  two  periods,  the  first  for  which 


i^ 


\ 


III! 


^S^ 


V 


Ua/»^ 


-y 


y 


THE  CUSTOM  OF  BURIAL. 


55 


iX 


we  have  any  sure  warranty  of  man's  existence  on  earth. 
But,  as  I  do  not  desire  to  introduce  controversial  matter  of 
any  sort  into  this  exposition,  I  will  waive  the  evidence  for 
burial  in  the  palaeolithic  age  as  doubtful,  and  will  merely 
mention  that  in  the  Mentone  caves,  according  to  Mr. 
Arthur  Evans,  a  most  competent  authority,  we  have  a 
case  of  true  burial  accompanied  by  neolithic  remains  of  a 
grade  of  culture  earlier  and  simpler  than  any  known  to  us 
elsewhere.  In  other  words,  from  the  very  earliest  begin- 
ning of  the  neolithic  age  men  buried  their  dead ;  and  they 
continued  to  bury  them,  in  caves  or  tumuli,  down  to  the 
end  of  neolithic  culture.  They  buried  them  in  the  Long 
Barrows  in  England  ;  they  buried  them  in  the  Ohio 
mounds;  they  buried  them  in  the  shadowy  forests  of  New 
Zealand;  they  buried  them  in  the  heart  of  darkest  Africa. 
I  know  of  no  case  of  burning  or  any  means  of  disposal  of 
the  dead,  otherwise  than  by  burial  or  its  earlier  equivalent, 
mummification,  among  people  in  the  stone  age  of  culture 
in  Europe.  It  is  only  when  bronze  and  other  metals  are 
introduced  that  races  advance  to  the  third  stage,  the  stage 
of  cremation.  In  America,  however,  the  Mexicans  were 
cremationists. 

The  wide  diflfusal  of  burial  over  the  globe  is  also  a  strong 
argument  for  its  relatively  primitive  origin.  In  all  parts 
of  the  world  men  now  bury  their  dead,  or  did  once  bury 
them.  From  the  Tombs  of  the  Kings  at  Pekin  to  the 
Pyramids  of  Memphis  ;  from  the  Peruvian  caves  to  the 
Samoyed  graveyards,  we  find  most  early  peoples,  most 
savage  peoples,  most  primitive  peoples,  once  or  still  en- 
gaged in  one  or  other  form  of  burying.  Burial  is  the 
common  and  universal  mode;  burning,  exposure,  throw- 
ing into  a  sacred  river,  and  so  forth,  are  sporadic  and  ex- 
ceptional, and  in  many  cases,  as  among  the  Hindus,  are 
demonstrably  of  late  origin,  and  connected  with  certain 
relatively  modern  refinements  of  religion. 

Once  more,  in  many  or  most  cases,  we  have  positive 
evidence  that  where  a  race  now  burns  its  dead,  it  used 


i 


'tV 


i'li 


I     I' 


■  ! 
.  ( 


.1 


r  ill 


fil'      i! 


ii 


II 


li 


"vx^v  "^'""^         V5> 


..>..'. -^         '-C- 


c^'* 


<-^^ 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


once  to  bitry  them.  Burial  preceded  burning  in  preheroic 
Greece,  as  it  also  did  in  Etruria  and  in  early  Latium.  The 
people  of  the  Long  Barrows,  in  Western  Europe  generally, 
buried  their  dead;  the  people  of  the  Round  Barrows  who 
succeeded  them,  and  who  possessed  a  far  higher  grude  of 
culture,  almost  always  cremated.  It  has  been  assumed 
that  burning  is  primordial  in  India  ;  but  Mr.  William 
Simpson,  the  well-known  artist  of  the  Illustrated  London 
News,  calls  my  attention  to  the  fact  that  the  Vedas  speak 
with  great  clearness  of  burial  as  the  usual  mode  of  dispos- 
ing of  the  corpse,  and  even  allude  to  the  tumulus,  the 
circle  of  stones  around  it,  and  the  sacred  temenos  which 
they  enclose.  According  to  Rajendralala  Mitra,  whose 
high  authority  on  the  subject  is  universally  acknowledged, 
burial  was  the  rule  in  India  till  about  the  thirteenth  or  four- 
teenth century  before  the  Christian  era;  then  came  in  cre- 
mation, with  burial  of  the  ashes,  and  this  continued  till 
about  the  time  of  Christ,  when  burial  was  dispensed  with, 
and  the  ashes  were  thrown  into  some  sacred  river.  I 
think,  therefore,  until  some  more  positive  evidence  is 
adduced  on  the  other  side,  we  may  rest  content  with  our 
general  conclusion  that  burial  is  the  oldest,  most  universal, 
and  most  savage  mode  of  disposing  of  the  remains  of  the 
dead  among  humanity  after  the  general  recognition  of 
death  as  a  positive  condition.  It  probably  took  its  rise  in 
an  early  period,  while  mankind  was  still  one  homogeneous 
species;  and  it  has  been  dispersed,  accordingly,  over  the 
whole  world,  even  to  the  most  remote  oceanic  islands. 

What  is  the  origin  of  this  barbaric  and  disgusting  cus- 
tom, so  repugnant  to  all  the  more  delicate  sentiments  of 
human  nature  ?  I  think  Mr.  Frazer  is  right  in  attributing 
it  to  the  terror  felt  by  the  living  for  the  ghosts  (or,  rather, 
at  first  the  corpses)  of  the  dead,  and  the  fear  that  they  may 
return  to  plague  or  alarm  their  surviving  fellow  tribesmen. 

In  his  admirable  paper  on  "  Certain  Burial  Customs  as 
Illustrative  of  the  Primitive  Theory  of  the  Soul,"  Mr. 
Frazer  points  out  that  certain  tribes  of  early  men  paid 


PRECAUTIONS  AGAINST  RESURRECTION. 


57 


n. 


great  attention  to  the  dead,  not  so  much  from  affection  as 
from  selfish  terror.  Ghosts  or  bodies  of  the  dead  haunt 
the  earth  everywhere,  unless  artificially  confined  to 
bounds,  and  make  themselves  exceedingly  disagreeable  to 
their  surviving  relatives.  To  prevent  this,  simple  primi- 
tive philosophy  in  its  second  stage  has  hit  upon  many  de- 
vices. The  most  universal  is  to  bury  the  dead— that  is  to 
say,  to  put  them  in  a  deep-dug  hole,  and  to  cover  them 
with  a  mighty  mound  of  earth,  which  has  now  sadly  de- 
generated in  civilised  countries  into  a  mere  formal  heap, 
but  which  had  originally  the  size  and  dignity  of  a  tumulus! 
The  object  of  piling  up  this  great  heap  of  earth  was  to  con- 
fine the  ghost  (or  corpse),  who  could  not  easily  move  so 
large  a  superincumbent  mass  of  matter.  In  point  of  fact, 
men  buried  their  dead  in  order  to  get  v/ell  rid  of  them, 
and  to  effectually  prevent  their  return  to  light  to  disturb 
the  survivors. 

For  the  same  reason  heavy  stones  were  often  piled  on 
the  top  of  the  dead.  In  one  form,  these  became  at  last  the 
cairn;  and,  as  the  ghosts  of  murderers  and  their  victims 
tend  to  be  especially  restless,  everybody  who  passes  their 
graves  in  Arabia,  Germany,  and  Spain  is  bound  to  add  a 
stone  to  the  growing  pile  in  order  to  confine  them.  In 
another  form,  that  of  the  single  big  stone  rolled  just  on 
top  of  the  body  to  keep  it  down  by  its  mass,  the  make- 
weight has  developed  into  the  modern  tombstone.  In  our 
own  times,  indeed,  the  tombstone  has  grown  into  a  mere 
posthumous  politeness,  and  is  generally  made  to  do  duty 
as  a  record  of  the  name  and  incomparable  virtues  of  the 
deceased  (concerning  whom,  nil  nisi  bonwn);  but  in  origin 
it  was  nothing  more  than  the  big,  heavy  boulder,  meant 
'to  confine  the  ghost,  and  was  anything  but  honorific  in 
intention  and  function. 

Again,  certain  nations  go  further  still  in  their  endeav- 
ours to  keep  the  ghost  (or  corpse)  from  roaming.  The 
corpse  of  a  Damara,  says  Galton,  having  been  sewn  up  in 
an  old  ox-hide  is  buried  in  a  hole,  and  the  spectators  jump 


58 


THE  LIFE  OF   THE  DEAD. 


\>A 


%\ 


li'  ' 


i  ■ 


backwards  and  forwards  over  the  grave  to  keep  the  de- 
ceased from  rising  out  of  it.  In  America,  the  Tupis  tied 
fast  all  the  limbs  of  the  corpse,  "  that  the  dead  man  might 
not  be  able  to  get  up,  and  infest  his  friends  with  his  visits." 
You  may  even  divert  a  river  from  its  course,  as  Mr.  Frazer 
notes,  bury  your  dead  man  securely  in  its  bed,  and  then 
allow  the  stream  to  return  to  its  channel.  It  was  thus  that 
Alaric  was  kept  in  his  grave  from  further  plaguing  human- 
ity; and  thus  Captain  Cameron  found  a  tribe  of  Central 
Africans  compelled  their  deceased  chiefs  to  "  cease  from 
troubling."  Sometimes,  again,  the  grave  is  enclosed  by 
a  fence  too  high  for  the  dead  man  to  clear  even  with  a  run- 
ning jump;  and  sometimes  the  survivors  take  the  prudent 
precaution  of  nailing  the  body  securely  to  the  cofifin,  or  of 
breaking  their  friend's  spine,  or  even — but  this  is  an  ex- 
treme case — of  hacking  him  to  pieces.  In  Christian  Eng- 
land the  poor  wretch  whom  misery  had  driven  to  suicide 
was  prevented  from  roaming  about  to  the  discomfort  of 
the  lieges  by  being  buried  with  a  stake  driven  barbarously 
through  him.  The  Australians,  in  like  manner,  used  to 
cut  off  the  thumb  of  a  slain  enemy  that  he  might  be  un- 
able to  draw  the  bow;  and  the  Greeks  were  wont  to  hack 
off  the  extremities  of  their  victims  in  order  to  incapacitate 
them  for  further  fighting.  These  cases  will  be  seen  to  be 
very  luminiferous  when  we  come  to  examine  the  origin 
and  meaning  of  cremation. 

Burial,  then,  I  take  it,  is  simply  by  origin  a  means 
adopted  by  the  living  to  protect  themselves  against  the 
vagrant  tendencies  of  the  actual  dead.  For  some  occult 
reason,  the  vast  majority  of  men  in  all  ages  have  been 
foolishly  afraid  of  meeting  with  the  spirits  of  the  departed. 
Their  great  desire  has  been,  not  to  see,  but  to  avoid  seeing 
these  singular  visitants  ;  and  for  that  purpose  they  in- 
vented, first  of  all,  burial,  and  afterwards  cremation. 

The  common  modern  conception  of  the  ghost  is  cer- 
tainly that  of  an  immaterial  or  shadowy  form,  which  can 
be  seen  but  not  touched,  and  which  preserves  an  outer 


•  \ 


m 


GHOST-BELIEFS.  59 

semblance  of  the  human  figure.  But  tha*  idea  itself, 
which  has  been  imported  into  all  our  descrip  ions  and  rea- 
sonings about  the  ghost-beliefs  of  primitiv't  man,  is,  I 
incline  to  think,  very  far  from  primitive,  and  has  been 
largely  influenced  by  quite  late  conceptions  derived  from 
the  cremational  rather  than  the  burial  level  of  religious 
philosophy.  In  other  words,  though,  in  accordance  with 
universal  usage  and  Mr.  Frazer's  precedent,  I  have  used 
the  word  "  ghost "  above  in  referring  to  these  supersti- 
tious terrors  of  early  man,  I  believe  it  is  far  less  the  spirit 
than  the  actual  corpse  itself  that  early  men  even  in  this 
second  stage  were  really  afraid  of.  It  is  the  corpse  that 
may  come  back  and  do  harm  to  survivors.  It  is  the  corpse 
that  must  be  kept  down  by  physical  means,  that  must  be 
covered  with  earth,  pressed  flat  beneath  a  big  and  ponder- 
ous stone,  deprived  of  its  thumbs,  its  hands,  its  eyes,  its 
members.  True,  I  believe  the  savage  also  thinks  of  the 
ghost  or  double  as  returning  to  earth ;  but  his  psychology, 
I  fancy,  is  not  so  definite  as  to  distinguish  very  accurately 
between  corpse  and  spirit.  The  accurate  differentiation 
of  the  two  belongs  rather,  it  seems  to  me,  to  the  post- 
cremational  and  more  spiritual  philosophy  than  to  the 
primary  or  preservative,  and  the  secondary  or  inhuma- 
tional.  Anybody  who  looks  at  the  evidence  collected  by 
Mr.  Frazer  will  see  for  himself  that  precautions  are  taken 
r  rather  against  the  return  of  the  actual  physical  body  than 
\  against  th  return  of  the  ghost  or  spirit.  Or  perhaps, 
\  to  be  more  precise,  the  two  are  hardly  thought  of  at  this 
'•  early  stage  in  separation  or  antithesis. 
I  If  we  look  at  the  means  taken  to  preserve  the  body 

after  death  among  the  majority  of  primitive  peoples,  above 
the  Tasmanian  level,  this  truth  of  the  corpse  being  itself 
immortal  becomes  clearer  and  clearer.  We  are  still,  in 
fact,  at  a  level  where  ghost  and  dead  man  are  insufficiently 
differentiated.  In  all  these  cases  it  is  beHeved  that  the 
'^'^^t:  dead  body  continues  to  live  in  the  grave  the  same  sort  of 
life  that  it  led  above  ground  ;    and  for  this  purpose  it  is 


»■ 


( 

•     j 

i 


6o 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


provided  with  weapons,  implements,  utensils,  food,  vessels,, 
and  all  the  necessaries  of  life  for  its  new  mansion.  Con- 
tinued sentient  existence  of  the  body  after  death  is  the 
keynote  of  the  earliest  level  of  psychical  philosophy. 
First,  the  corpse  lives  in  the  hut  with  its  family:  later,  it 
lives  in  the  grave  with  its  forefathers. 

But  side  by  side  with  this  naive  belief  in  the  continued 
existence  of  the  body  after  death,  which  survives  into  the 
inhumational  stage  of  evolution,  goes  another  and  appa- 
rently irreconcilable  belief  in  a  future  resurrection.  Strictly 
speaking,  of  course,  if  the  body  is  still  alive,  there  is  no 
need  for  any  such  special  revivification.  But  religious 
thought,  as  we  all  know,  does  not  always  pride  itself  upon 
the  temporal  virtues  of  logic  or  consistency  ;  and  the 
savage  in  particular  is  not  in  the  least  staggered  at  being 
asked  to  conceive  of  one  and  the  same  subject  in  two  op- 
posite and  contradictory  manners.  He  does  not  bring 
the  two  incongruities  into  thought  together;  he  thinks 
them  alternately,  sometimes  one,  sometimes  the  other. 
Even  Christian  systematists  are  quite  accustomed  to  com- 
bine the  incongruous  beliefs  in  a  future  resurrection  and  in. 
the  continued  existence  of  the  soul  after  death,  by  suppos- 
ing that  the  soul  remains  meanwhile  in  some  nondescript 
limbo,  apart  from  its  body — some  uncertain  Sheol,  some 
dim  hades  or  purgatory  or  "  place  of  departed  spirits." 
TLe  savage  is  scarcely  likely  to  be  more  exacting  in  this 
matter  than  our  doctors  of  divinity. 

It  is  the  common  belief  of  the  second  or  inhumational 
stage,  then,  that  there  will  be  at  some  time  or  other  a 
"  General  Resurrection."  No  doubt  this  General  Resur- 
rection has  been  slowly  developed  out  of  the  belief  in  and 
expectation  of  many  partial  resurrections.  It  is  under- 
stood that  each  individual  corpse  will,  or  may,  resurge  at 
some  time:  therefore  it  is  believed  that  all  corpses  together 
will  resurge  at  a  single  particular  moment.  So  long  as 
burial  persists,  the  belief  in  the  Resurrection  persists  be- 


% 


"s^ 


-r 


V. 


THE  GENERAL  RESURRECTION. 


6i 


m 


side  it,  and  forms  a  main  feature  in  the  current  conception 
of  the  future  life  among  the  people  who  practise  it. 

How,  then,  do  we  progress  from  this  second  or  inhuma- 
tional  stage  to  the  third  stage  with  its  practice  of  burning, 
and  its  correlated  dogma  of  the  Immortality  of  the  Soul  ? 

In  this  way,  as  it  seems  to  me.     Besides  keeping  down 
the  ghost  (or  corpse)  with  clods  and  stones,  it  was  usual 
in  many  cases  to  adopt  other  still  stronger  persuasives 
and  dissuasives  in  the  same  direction.     Sometimes  the 
persuasives  were  of  the  gentlest  type  ;    for  example,  the 
dead  man  was  often  politely  requested  and  adjured  to  re- 
main quiet  in  the  grave  and  to  give  no  trouble.      But 
sometimes  they  were  less  bland  ;    the  corpse  was  often 
pelted  with  sticks,  stones,  and  hot  coals,  in  order  to  show 
him  that  his  visits  at  home  would  not  in  future  be  ap- 
preciated.    The  ordinary  stake  and  mutilation  treatment 
goes,  it  is  clear,  upon  the  same  principle;  if  the  man  has 
no  feet  or  legs  of  his  own,  he  cannot  very  well  walk  back 
again.     But  further  developments  of  the  like  crude  idea 
are  to  cut  off  the  head,  to  tear  out  the  heart,  to  hack  the 
body  in  pieces,  to  pour  boiling  water  and  vinegar  over  the 
dangerous  place  where  the  corpse  lies  buried.     Now  burn- 
ing, I  take  it,  belonged  originally  to  the  same  category  of 
strong  measures  against  refractory  ghosts  or  corpses;  and 
this  is  the  more  probable  owing  to  the  fact  that  it  is  men- 
tioned by  Mr.  Frazer  among  the  remedies  recommended 
for  use  in  the  extreme  case  of  vampires.      Its  original 
object  was,  no  doubt,  to  prevent  the  corpse  from  returning 
in  any  way  to  the  homes  of  the  living. 

Once  any  people  adopted  burning  as  a  regular  custom, 
however,  the  chances  are  that,  ccuteris  paribus,  it  would 
continue  and  spread.  For  the  practice  of  cremation  is 
so  much  more  wholesome  and  sanitary  than  the  practice 
of  burial  that  it  would  give  a  double  advantage  in  the 
struggle  for  existence  to  any  race  that  adopted  it,  in  peace 
and  in  war.  Hence  it  is  quite  natural  that  when  at  a  cer- 
tain grade  of  culture  certain  races  happened  to  light  upon 


f 


62 


THE  LIFE  OF   THE  DEAD. 


Iv.       I 


I   J. 


i 


ill 


If  ; 


m 


it  in  this  superstitious  way,  those  races  would  be  likely 
to  thrive  and  to  take  the  lead  in  culture  as  long  as  no  ad- 
verse circumstances  counteracted  the  advantage. 

But  the  superstitions  and  the  false  psychology  which 
gave  rise  at  first  to  the  notion  of  a  continued  life  after 
death  would  not,  of  course,  disappear  with  the  introduc- 
tion of  burning.  The  primitive  cremationists  may  have 
hoped,  by  reducing  to  ashes  the  bodies  of  their  dead,  to 
prevent  the  recurrence  of  the  corpse  to  the  presence  of  the 
living;  but  they  could  not  prevent  the  recurrence  of  the 
ghost  in  the  dreams  of  the  survivors;  they  could  not  pre- 
vent the  wind  that  sighed  about  the  dead  man's  grave, 
the  bats  that  flitted,  the  vague  noises  that  terrified,  the 
abiding  sense  of  the  corpse's  presence.  All  the  factors 
that  go  to  make  up  the  ghost  or  the  revenant  (to  use  a  safe 
word  less  liable  to  misinterpretation)  still  remained  as 
active  as  ever.  Hence,  I  believe,  with  the  introduction  of 
cremation  the  conception  of  the  ghost  merely  suffered  an 
airy  change.  He  grew  more  shadowy,  more  immaterial, 
more  light,  more  spiritual.  In  one  word,  he  became, 
strictly  speaking,  a  ghost  as  we  now  understand  the  word, 
not  a  returning  dead  man.  This  conception  of  the  ghost 
as  essentially  a  shade  or  shadow  belongs  peculiarly,  it 
seems  to  me,  to  the  cremating  peoples.  I  can  answer  for 
it  that  among  negroes,  for  example,  the  "  duppy  "  is  con- 
ceived as  quite  a  material  object.  It  is  classical  literature, 
the  literature  of  the  cremating  Greeks  and  Romans,  that 
has  familiarised  us  most  with  the  idea  of  the  ghost  as 
shadowy  and  intangible.  Burying  races  have  more  solid 
doubles.  When  Peter  escaped  from  prison  in  Jerusalem, 
the  assembled  brethren  were  of  opinion  that  it  must  be 
"  his  angel."  The  white  woman  who  lived  for  years  in  a 
native  Australian  tribe  was  always  spoken  of  by  her  hosts 
as  a  ghost.  In  one  word,  at  a  low  stage  of  culture  the 
revenant  is  conceived  of  as  material  and  earthly  ;  at  a 
higher  stage,  he  is  conceived  of  as  immaterial  and 
shadowy. 


,'\ 


THE  CUSTOM  OF  CREMATION. 


63 


Now  when  people  take  to  burning  their  dead,  it  is  clear 
they  will  no  longer  be  able  to  believe  in  the  Resurrection 
of  the  Body.  Indeed,  if  I  am  right  in  the  theory  here  set 
forth,  it  is  just  in  order  to  prevent  tne  Resurrection  of  the 
Body  at  inconvenient  moments  that  they  take  to  burning. 
To  be  sure,  civilised  nations,  with  their  developed  power 
of  believing  in  miracles,  are  capable  of  supposing,  not  only 
that  the  sea  will  yield  up  its  dead,  but  also  that  burnt, 
mangled,  or  dispersed  bodies  will  be  collected  from  all 
parts  to  be  put  together  again  at  the  Resurrection.  This, 
however,  is  not  the  naive  belief  of  simple  and  natural  men. 
To  them,  when  you  have  burnt  a  body  you  have  utterly 
destroyed  it,  here  and  hereafter;  and  we  know  that  mutila- 
tion and  burning  were  employed  for  this  very  purpose  in 
the  case  of  vampires  and  other  corpses  whose  total  sup- 
pression was  desirable.  Sepoys  were  blown  from  the 
guns  in  the  Indian  mutiny  for  the  express  reason  that, 
according  to  the  Hindu  belief,  that  method  of  disposing 
of  them  destroyed  not  only  the  body  but  the  soul  as  well — 
got  rid  of  them  entirely.  The  ordinary  human  idea  is  that 
when  you  burn  a  body  you  simply  annihilate  it;  and  on 
that  very  account  early  Christians  preferred  burial  to  cre- 
mation, because  they  thought  they  stood  thereby  a  better 
chance  at  the  Resurrection.  It  is  true  they  allowed  that 
the  divine  omnipotence  could  make  new  bodies  for  the 
martyrs  who  were  burnt;  but  for  themselves,  they  seem 
to  have  preferred  on  the  average  to  go  on  afresh  with  their 
old  familiar  ones. 

Naturally,  therefore,  among  cremating  peoples,  the 
doctrine  of  the  Resurrection  of  the  Body  tended  to  go  out, 
and  what  replaced  it  was  the  doctrine  of  the  Immortality 
of  the  Soul.  You  may  burn  the  body,  but  the  spirit  still 
survives  ;  and  the  survival  gives  origin  to  a  new  philo- 
sophy of  ghosts  and  revenants,  a  new  idea  of  the  inner 
nature  of  ghosthood.  Gradually  the  spirit  gets  to  be  con- 
ceived as  diviner  essence,  entangled  and  imprisoned,  as  it 
were,  in  the  meshes  of  the  flesh,  and  only  to  be  set  free  by 


h  ■ 


64 


THE  LIFE  OF  THE  DEAD. 


I'  I 


''  • 


5,      ,ii    I 


IfT't 


means  of  fire,  which  thus  becomes  envisaged  at  last  as 
friendly  rather  than  destructive  in  its  action  on  the  dead 
body.  What  was  at  first  a  precaution  against  the  return  of 
the  corpse  becomes  in  the  end  a  pious  duty;  just  as  burial 
itself,  originally  a  selfish  precaution  against  the  pranks 
and  tricks  of  returning  corpses,  becomes  in  the  end  so 
sacred  and  imperative  that  unburied  ghosts  are  conceived 
as  wandering  about,  Archytas-wise,  begging  for  the  favour 
of  a  handful  of  sand  to  prevent  them  from  homeless  vaga- 
bondage for  ever.  Nations  who  burn  come  to  regard  the 
act  of  burning  as  the  appointed  means  for  freeing  the 
ghost  from  the  confining  meshes  of  the  body,  and  regard  it 
rather  as  a  solemn  duty  to  the  dead  than  as  a  personal  pre- 
caution. 

Not  only  so,  but  there  arises  among  them  a  vague  and 
fanciful  conception  of  the  world  of  shades  very  different 
indeed  from  the  definite  and  material  conception  of  the 
two  earlier  stages.  The  mummy  was  looked  upon  as  in- 
habiting the  tomb,  which  was  furnished  and  decorated  for 
its  reception  like  a  house;  and  it  was  provided  with  every 
needful  article  for  use  and  comfort.  Even  the  buried  body 
was  supplied  with  tools  and  implements  for  the  ghost. 
The  necessities  of  the  shade  are  quite  different  and  more 
shadowy.  He  has  no  need  of  earthly  tools  or  implements. 
The  objects  found  in  the  Long  Barrows  of  the  burying 
folk  and  the  Round  Barrows  of  the  cremationists  well  illus- 
trate this  primordial  and  far-reaching  difference.  The 
Long  Barrows  of  the  Stone  Age  people  are  piled  above  an 
interment  ;  they  contain  a  chambered  tomb,  which  is 
really  the  subterranean  home  or  palace  of  the  body  buried 
in  it.  The  wives  and  slaves  of  the  deceased  were  killed 
and  interred  with  him  to  keep  him  company  iii  his  new  life 
in  the  grave;  and  implements,  weapons,  drinking-cups, 
games,  trinkets,  and  ornaments  were  buried  with  their 
owners.  The  life  in  the  grave  was  all  as  material  and  real 
as  this  one;  the  same  objects  that  served  the  warrior  in 
this  world  would  equally  serve  him  in  the  same  form  in  the 


■ 


i 


CREMATION  AND   THE  SHADE. 


n 
le 


next.  It  is  quite  different  with  the  Roi'.nd  Barrows  of  the 
Bronze  Age  cremationists.  These  barrows  are  piled 
round  an  urn,  which  determines  the  shape  of  the  tumukis, 
as  the  chambered  tomb  and  the  corpse  determine  the 
shape  of  the  earlier  Stone  Age  interments.  They  con- 
tain ashes  alone;  and  the  implements  and  weapons  placed 
in  them  are  all  broken  or  charred  with  fire.  Why  ? 
Because  the  ghost,  immaterial  as  he  has  now  become,  can 
no  longer  make  use  of  solid  earthly  weapons  or  utensils. 
It  is  only  their  ghosts  or  shadows  that  can  be  of  any  use 
to  the  ghostly  possessor  in  the  land  of  shades.  Hence 
everything  he  needs  is  burnt  or  broken,  in  order  that  its 
ghost  may  be  released  and  liberated  ;  and  all  material 
objects  are  now  conceived  as  possessing  such  ghosts,  which 
can  be  utilised  accordingly  in  the  world  of  spirits. 

Note  also  that  with  this  advance  from  the  surviving 
or  revivable  Corpse  to  the  immortal  Soul  or  Spirit,  there 
goes  almost  naturally  and  necessarily  a  correlative  advance 
from  continued  but  solitary  life  in  the  tomb  to  a  freer  and 
wider  life  in  an  underground  world  of  shades  and  spirits. 
The  ghost  gets  greatly  liberated  and  emancipated.  He 
has  more  freedom  of  movement,  and  becomes  a  citizen  of 
an  organised  community,  often  envisaged  as  ruled  over 
by  a  King  of  the  Dead,  and  as  divided  into  places  of  re- 
ward and  punishment.  But  while  we  modern  Europeans 
pretend  to  be  resurrectionists,  it  is  a  fact  that  our  current 
ghostly  and  eschatological  conceptions  (I  speak  of  the 
world  at  large,  not  of  mere  scholastic  theologians)  have 
been  largely  influenced  by  ideas  derived  from  this  opposite 
doctrine — a  doctrine  once  held  by  many  or  most  of  our 
own  ancestors,  and  familiarised  to  us  from  childhood  in 
classical  literature.  In  fact,  while  most  Englishmen  of  the 
present  day  believe  they  believe  in  the  Resurrection  of  the 
Body,  what  they  really  believe  in  is  the  Immortality  of  the 
Soul. 

It  might  seem  at  first  sight  as  though  a  grave  discre- 
pancy existed  between  the  two  incongruous  ideas,  first  of 


Hi  ■:- 


66 


THE  LIFE  OP   THE  DEAD. 


I  I 

•I 


V         ! 

! '  \\ 


burying  or  burning  your  dead  so  that  they  may  not  be  able 
to  return  or  to  molest  you,  and  second  of  worshipping  at 
their  graves  or  making  offerings  to  their  disembodied 
spirits.     But  to  the  savage  mind  these  two  conceptions 
are  by  no  means  irreconcilable.     While  he  jumps  upon  the 
corpse  of  his  friend  or  his  father  to  keep  it  in  the  narrow 
pit  he  has  digged  for  it,  he  yet  brings  it  presents  of  food 
and  drink,  or  slays  animals  at  the  tomb,  that  the  ghost  may 
be  refreshed  by  the  blood  that  trickles  down  to  it.     In- 
deed, several  intermediate  customs  occur,  which  help  us 
to  bridge  over  the  apparent  gulf  between  reverential  pre- 
servation of  the  mummified  body,  and  the  coarse  precau- 
tions of  burial  or  burning.     Thus,  in  many  cases,  some  of 
which  we  shall  examine  in  the  next  chapter,  after  the 
body  has  been  for  some  time  buried,  the  head  is  disin- 
terred, and  treasured  with  jare  in  the  family  oratory,  where 
it  is  worshipped  and  tended,  and  where  it  often  gives 
oracles  to  the  members  o    die  household.     A  ceremonial 
washing  is  almost  always  a  feature  in  this  reception  of  the 
head;  it  recurs  again  and  again  in  various  cases,  down  to 
the  enshrinement  of  the  head  of  Hoseyn  at  Cairo,  and  that 
of  St.  Denis  at  the  abbey  of  the  same  name,  to  both  of 
which  we  shall  allude  once  more  at  a  far  later  stage  of  our 
enquiry.     For  the  present,  it  must  sufifice  to  say  that  the 
ceremonial  and  oracular  preservation  of  the  head — the 
part  which  sees,  and  speaks,  and  eats,  and  drinks,  and 
listens — is  a  common  feature  in  all  religious  u  ;ages;  that 
it  gives  rise  apparently  to  the  collections  of  family  skulls 
which  adorn  so  many  savage  huts  and  oratories;  that  it 
may  be  answerable  ultimately  for  the  Roman  busta  and 
many  other  imitative  images  of  the  dead,  in  which  the 
head  alone  is  represented;  and  that  when  transferred  to 
the  sacred  human  or  animal  victim  (himself,  as  we  shall 
hereafter  see,  a  slain  god),  it  seems  to  account  for  the 
human  heads  hung  up  by  the  Dyaks  and  other  savages 
about  their  houses,  as  also  for  the  skulls  of  oxen  and  other 
sacred  animals  habitually  displayed  on  the  front  of  places 


VALCE  OF  THE  HEAD  OR  SKULL 


67 


of  worship,  whose  last  relic  is  the  sculptured  oxen's  heads 
which  fill  the  metopes  in  some  Greek  and  most  Roman 
temples.  Much  of  this,  I  admit,  will  be  little  <-()mprehen- 
sible  to  the  reader  at  the  present  stage  of  our  argument: 
but  I  beg  him  to  bear  in  mind  provisionally  this  oracular 
and  representative  value  of  the  head  or  skull  from  this 
point  lurth;  he  will  find,  as  he  proceeds,  its  meaning  will 
become  clearer  and  ever  clearer  at  each  successive  stage 
of  our  exposition. 

I  ought  also  to  add  that  between  complete  preservation 
of  the  corpse  and  the  practice  of  burial  there  seems  to  have 
gone  another  intermediate  stage,  now  comparatively  rare, 
but  once  very  general,  if  we  may  judge  from  the  traces  it 
has  left  behind  it— a  stage  when  all  the  body  or  part  of  it 
was  sacramentally  eaten  by  the  survivors  as  an  act  of  de- 
votion. We  will  consider  this  curious  and  revolting  prac- 
tice more  fully  when  we  reach  the  abstruse  problem  of 
sacrifice  and  sacrament;  for  the  present  it  will  suffice  to 
say  that  in  many  instances,  in  Australia,  South  America, 
and  elsewhere,  the  body  is  eaten,  while  only  the  bones  are 
burned  or  buried.  Among  these  savages,  again,  it  usually 
happens  that  the  head  is  cleaned  of  its  flesh  by  cooking, 
while  the  skull  is  ceremonially  washed,  and  preserved  as  an 
object  of  household  veneration  and  an  oracular  deity.  In- 
stances will  be  quoted  in  succeeding  chapters. 

Thus,  between  the  care  taken  to  prevent  returns  of  the 
corpse,  and  the  worship  paid  to  the  ghost  or  shade,  primi- 
tive races  feel  no  such  sense  of  discrepancy  or  incongruity 
as  would  instantly  occur  to  civilised  people. 

The  three  stages  in  human  ideas  with  which  this  chapter 
deals  may  be  shortly  summed  up  as  corpse-worship,  ghost- 
worship,  and  shade-worship. 


f.' 


11 


I  ' 


68 


THE  ORIGIN  or  GODS. 


,^    i 


CHAPTER   IV. 


THE    ORIGIN    OF   GODS. 


J 


Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  has  traced  so  admirably  in  his 
Principles  of  Sociology  the  progress  of  development  from 
the  Ghost  to  the  God  that  I  do  not  propose  in  this  chapter 
to  attempt  much  more  than  a  brief  recapitulation  of  his 
main  propositions,  which,  however,  I  shall  supplement 
with  fresh  examples,  and  adapt  at  the  same  time  to  the 
conception  of  three  successive  stages  in  human  ideas  about 
the  Life  of  the  Dead,  as  set  forth  in  the  preceding  argu- 
ment. But  the  hasty  resume  which  I  shall  give  at  present 
will  be  fleshed  out  incidentally  at  a  later  point  by  consider- 
ation of  several  national  religions. 

In  the  earliest  stage  of  all — the  stage  where  the  actual 
bodies  of  the  dead  are  preserved, — Gods  as  such  are 
for  the  most  part  unknown  :  it  is  the  corpses  of  friends 
and  ancestors  that  are  worshipped  and  reverenced.  For 
example,  Ellis  says  of  the  corpse  of  a  Tahitian  chief 
that  it  was  placed  in  a  sitting  posture  under  a  protecting 
shed  ;  "  a  small  altar  was  erected  before  it,  and  offerings 
of  fruit,  food,  and  flowers  were  daily  presented  by  the 
relatives,  or  the  priest  appointed  to  attend  the  body." 
(This  point  about  the  priest  is  of  essential  importance.) 
The  Central  Americans,  again,  as  Mr.  Spencer  notes, 
performed  similar  rites  before  bodies  dried  by  artificial 
heat.  The  New  Guinea  people,  as  D'Albertis  found, 
worship  the  dried  mummies  of  their  fathers  and  husbands. 
A  little  higher  in  the  scale,  we  get  the  developed  mummy- 
worship  of  Egypt  and  Peru,  which  survives  even  after  the 


rRO]f  aimsT  to  cod. 


6» 


J 


evolution  of  greater  gods,  from  powerful  kings  or  chief- 
tains. Other  evidence  in  abundance  has  been  adduced 
from  Polynesia  and  from  Africa.  Wherever  the  actual 
bodies  of  the  dead  are  preserved,  there  also  worship  and 
offerings  are  paid  to  them. 

Often,  however,  as  already  noted,  it  is  not  the  whole 
body  but  the  head  alone  tliat  is  specially  kept  and  wor- 
shipped. Thus  Mr.  H.  O.  Forbes  says  of  the  people  of 
Burn  :  "  The  dead  are  buried  in  the  forest  in  some  se- 
cluded spot,  marked  often  by  a  tncrang  or  grave-pole  ; 
over  which  at  certain  intervals  the  relatives  place  tobacco, 
cigarettes,  and  various  offerings.  When  the  body  is  de- 
composed, the  son  or  nearest  relative  disinters  the  head, 
wraps  a  new  cloth  about  it,  and  places  it  in  the  Matakau 
at  the  back  of  his  house,  or  in  a  little  hut  erected  for  it 
near  the  grave.  It  is  the  representative  of  his  forefathers, 
whose  behests  he  holds  in  the  greatest  respect." 

Two  points  are  worthy  of  notice  in  this  interesting  ac- 
count, as  giving  us  an  anticipatory  hint  of  two  further  ac- 
cessories whose  evolution  we  must  trace  hereafter  ;  first 
the  grave-stake,  which  is  probably  the  origin  of  the 
wooden  idol  ;  and  second,  the  little  hut  erected  over  the 
head  by  tho  side  of  the  grave,  which  is  undoubtedly  one  of 
the  origins  of  the  temple  or  praying-house.  Observe  also 
the  ceren>/^ria  v  rapping  of  the  skull  in  cloth,  and  its 
orac'iila'  '"uuc^'oit,!-, 

SimiiUily.  IVIr.  VVyatt  Gill,  the  well-known  missionary, 
wriff  '  f  del  ^aby  at  Boera,  in  New  Guinea  :  "  It  will 
be  covcicu  til  two  inches  of  soil,  the  friends  watching 
beside  the  gra'  t'  ;  but  eventually  the  skull  and  smaller 
bones  will  be  preserved  and  worn  by  the  mother."  And 
of  the  ?  lau  people  he  says  :  "  Enquiring  the  use  of  several 
small  houses  I  learned  that  it  is  to  cover  grave-pits.  All 
the  members  of  a  family  at  death  occupy  the  same  grave, 
the  earth  that  thinly  covered  the  last  occupant  being 
scooped  out  to  admit  the  newcomer.  These  graves  are 
shallow  ;  the  dead  are  buried  in  a  sitting  posture,  hands 


w 


70 


THE  ORIGIN  Ol<  GODS. 


if! 


IS 


1    ■; 


folded.  The  earth  is  thrown  in  up  to  the  mouth  only. 
An  earthen  pot  covers  the  head.  After  a  time  the  pot  is 
taken  off,  the  perfect  skull  removed  and  cleansed — even- 
tually to  be  hung  up  in  a  basket  or  net  inside  the  dwelling 
of  the  deceased  over  the  fire,  to  blacken  in  the  smoke." 
In  Africa,  again,  the  skull  is  frequently  preserved  in  such 
a  pot  and  prayed  to.  In  America,  earthenware  pots  have 
been  found  moulded  round  human  skulls  in  mounds  at 
New  Madrid  and  elsewhere  ;  the  skull  cannot  be  removed 
without  breaking  the  vessel.  Indeed,  this  curious  method 
of  preservation  in  pots  seems  to  be  very  widespread  ;  we 
get  perhaps  a  vague  hint  or  reminiscence  of  its  former  pre- 
valence in  Europe  in  the  story  of  Isabella  and  the  pot  of 
basil. 

The  special  selection  and  preservation  of  the  head  as  an 
objec^  of  worship  thus  noted  in  New  Guinea  and  the 
Mal".y  Archipelago  is  also  still  found  among  many  other 
primitive  peoples.  For  instance,  the  Andamanese  widows 
keep  the  skulls  of  their  husbands  as  a  precious  possession  : 
and  the  New  Caledonians,  in  case  of  sickness  or  calamities, 
"  present  offerings  of  food  to  the  skulls  of  the  departed." 
Mr.  Spencer  quotes  several  similar  examples,  a  few  of 
which  alone  I  extract  from  his  pages. 

"  '  In  the  private  fetish-hut  of  King  Adolee,  at  Badagry, 
the  skull  of  that  monarch's  father  is  preserved  in  a  clay 
vessel  placed  in  the  earth.'  He  *  gently  rebukes  it  if  his 
success  does  not  happen  to  answer  his  expectations.' 
Similarly  among  the  Mandans,  who  place  the  skulls  of  their 
dead  in  a  circle,  each  wife  knows  the  skull  of  her  former 
husband  or  child,  *  and  there  seldom  passes  a  day  that  she 
does  not  visit  it,  with  a  dish  of  the  best  cooked  food.  .  .  . 
There  is  scarcely  an  hour  in  a  pleasant  day,  but  more  or 
less  of  these  women  may  be  seen  sitting  or  lying  by  the 
skull  of  their  child  or  husband — talking  to  it  in  the  most 
pleasant  and  endearing  language  that  they  can  use  (as 
they  were  wont  to  do  in  former  days),  and  seemingly  get- 
ting an  answer  back.' " 


wmmv^i^mrw 


ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 


71 


This  affectionate  type  of  converse  with  the  dead,  almost 
free  from  fear,  is  especially  characteristic  of  the  first  or 
corpse-preserving  stage  of  human  death-conceptions.  It 
seldom  survives  where  burial  has  made  the  feeling  toward 
the  corpse  a  painful  or  loathsome  one,  and  it  is  then  con- 
fined to  the  head  alone,  while  the  grave  itself  with  the 
body  it  encloses  is  rather  shunned  and  dreaded. 

A  little  above  this  level,  Mr.  Du  Chaillu  notes  that  some 
of  his  West  African  followers,  when  going  on  an  expe- 
dition, brought  out  the  skulls  of  their  ancestors  (which 
they  religiously  preserved)  and  scraped  off  small  portions 
of  the  bone,  which  they  mixed  with  water  and  drank  ; 
giving  as  a  reason  for  this  conduct  that  their  ancestors 
were  brave,  and  that  by  drinking  a  portion  of  them  they 
too  became  brave  and  fearless  like  their  ancestors.  Here 
we  have  a  simple  and  early  case  of  that  habit  of  "eating 
the  god "  to  whose  universality  and  importance  Mr. 
Frazer  has  so  forcibly  called  attention,  and  which  we  must 
examine  at  full  in  a  subsequent  chapter. 

Throughout  the  earlier  and  ruder  phases  of  human  evo- 
lution, this  primitive  conception  of  ancestors  or  dead  rela- 
tives as  the  chief  known  objects  of  worship  survives  un- 
diluted :  and  ancestor-worship  remains  to  this  day  the 
principal  religion  of  the  Chinese,  and  of  several  other  peo- 
ples. Gods,  as  such,  are  practically  unknown  in  China. 
Ancestor-worship  also  survives  in  many  other  races  as  one 
of  the  main  cults,  even  after  other  elements  of  later  re- 
ligion have  been  superimposed  upon  it.  In  Greece  and 
Rome,  it  remained  to  the  last  an  important  part  of  do- 
mestic ritual.  But  in  most  cases,  a  gradual  differentiation 
is  set  up  in  time  between  various  classes  of  ghosts  or  dead 
persons,  some  ghosts  being  considered  of  more  impor- 
tance and  power  than  others ;  and  out  of  these  last  it  is  that 
gods  as  a  rule  are  finally  developed.  A  god,  in  fact,  is  in 
the  beginning  at  least  an  exceptionally  powerful  and 
friendly  ghost — a  ghost  able  to  help,  and  from  whose  help 
great  things  may  reasonably  be  expected. 


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THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


Ih'^ 


Again,  the  rise  of  chieftainship  and  kingship  has  much 

•jdo  with  the  growth  of  a  higher  conception  of  godhead  ; 
a  dead  king  of  any  great  power  or  authority  is  sure  to  jc 
thought  of  in  time  as  a  god  of  considerable  importance. 
We  shall  trace  out  this  idea  more  fully  hereafter  in  the 
religion  of  Egypt  ;  for  the  present  it  must  suffice  to  say 
that  the  supposed  power  of  the  gods  in  each  pantheon 
has  regularly  increased  in  proportion  to  the  increased 
power  of  kings  or  emperors. 

When  we  pass  from  the  first  plane  of  corpse-preservation 
and  mummification  to  the  second  plane  where  burial  is 
habitual,  it  might  seem  at  a  hasty  glance  as  though  con- 
tinued worship  of  the  dead,  and  their  elevation  into  gods, 
would  no  longer  be  possible.  For  we  saw  that  burial  is 
prompted  by  a  deadly  fear  lest  the  corpse  or  ghost  should 
return  to  plague  the  living.  Nevertheless,  natural  affec- 
tion for  parents  or  friends,  and  the  desire  to  ensure  their 
good  will  and  aid,  make  these  seemingly  contrary  ideas 
reconcilable.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  find  that  even  when 
men  bury  or  burn  their  dead,  they  continue  to  worship 
them  :  while,  as  we  shall  show  in  the  sequel,  even  the 
great  stones  which  they  roll  on  top  of  the  grave  to  prevent 
the  dead  from  rising  again  become  in  time  altars  on  which 
sacrifices  are  offered  to  the  spirit.  ,         , 

In  these  two  later  stages  of  thought  with  regard  to  the 
dead  which  accompany  burial  and  cremation,  the  gods, 
indeed,  grow  more  and  more  distinct  from  minor  ghosts 
with  an  accelerated  rapidity  of  evolution.  They  grow 
greater  in  proportion  to  the  rise  of  temples  and  hierarchies. 
Furthermore,  the  very  indeliniteness  of  the  bodiless  ghost 
tells  in  favour  of  an  enlarged  godship.  The  gods  are 
thought  of  as  more  and  more  aerial  and  immaterial,  less 
definitely  human  in  form  and  nature  ;  they  are  clothed 
with  might}^  attributes  ;  they  assume  colossal  size  ;  they 
are  even  identified  with  the  sun,  the  moon,  the  great 
powers  of  nature.  But  they  are  never  quite  omnipotent 
during  the  polytheistic  stage,  because  in  a  pantheon  they 


> 


INCREASED  POWER  OF   THE  GODS. 


73 


are  necessarily  mutually  limiting.  Even  in  the  Greek  and 
Roman  civilisation,  it  is  clear  that  the  gods  were  not 
commonly  envisaged  by  ordinary  minds  as  much  more 
than  human  ;  for  Pisistratus  dressed  up  a  courtesan  at 
Athens  to  represent  Pallas  Athene,  and  imposed  by  this 
cheap  theatrical  trick  upon  the  vulgar  Athenians  ;  while 
Paul  and  Barnabas  were  taken  at  Lystra  for  Zeus  and 
Hermes.  Many  similar  instances  will  occur  at  once  to  the 
classical  scholar.  It  is  only  quite  late,  under  the  influence 
of  monotheism,  that  the  exalted  conceptions  of  deity  now 
prevalent  began  to  form  themselves  in  Judaism  and  Chris- 
tianity. 

Mere  domestic  ancestor-worship,  once  more,  could 
scarcely  give  us  the  origin  of  anything  more  than  de- 
mestic  religion — the  cult  of  the  manes,  the  household  gods, 
as  distinct  from  that  of  the  tribal  and  national  deities, 
.^it  kingship  supplies  us  with  the  missing  link.  We  have 
se^rin  Mr.  Dufif  Macdonald's  accotmt-  -of  the  Central 
African  god-making  how  the  worship  of  the  chief's  an- 
cestors gives  rise  to  tribal  or  village  gods  ;  and  it  is  clear 
how,  as  chieftainship  and  kingship  widen,  national  gods 
of  far  higher  types  may  gradually  evolve  from  these  early 
monarchs.  Especially  must  we  take  the  time-element  into 
account,  remembering  that  the  earlier  ancestors  get  at 
last  to  be  individually  forgotten  as  men,  and  remain  in 
memory  only  as  supernatural  beings.  Thus  kingship 
rapidly  reacts  upon  godship.  If  the  living  king  himself  is 
great,  how  much  greater  must  be  the  ancestor  whom  even 
the  king  himself  fears  and  worships  ;  and  how  infinitely 
greater  still  that  yet  earlier  god,  the  ancestor's  ancestor, 
whom  the  ancestor  himself  revered  and  propitiated  !  In 
some  such  way  there  grows  up  gradually  a  hierarchy  of 
gods,  among  whom  the  oldest,  and  therefore  the  least 
known,  are  usually  in  the  end  the  greatest  of  any. 

The  consolidation  of  kingdoms  and  empires,  and  the 
advance  of  the  arts,  tell  strongly  with  concurrent  force  in 
these  directions  ;  while  the  invention  of  written  language 


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74 


)-'\        •  ..V 


TH.P.  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


sets  a  final  seal  Oii  the  godhead  and  might  of  great  early 
ancestors.  Among  very  primitive  tribes,  indeed,  we  find 
as  a  rule  only  very  domestic  and  recent  objects  of  worr/aip. 
The  chief  prays  for  the  most  part  to  his  own  father  and  his 
immediate  predecessors.  The  more  ancient  ancestors,  as 
Mr.  Duff  Macdonald  has  so  well  pointed  out,  grow  rapidly 
into  oblivion.  But  with  more  advanced  races,  various 
agencies  arise  which  help  to  keep  in  mind  the  early  dead  ; 
and  in  very  evolved  communities  these  agencies,  reaching  a 
high  pitch  of  evolution,  make  the  recen!;  gods  or  kings  or 
ghosts  seem  comparatively  unimportant  by  the  side  of  the 
very  ancient  and  very  long-worshipped  ones.  More  than 
of  any  other  thing,  it  may  be  said  of  a  god,  vires  acquirit 
eundo.  Thus,  in  advanced  types  of  society,  saints  or  gods 
of  recent  origin  assume  but  secondary  or  minor  impor- 
tance ;  while  the  highest  and  greatest  gods  of  all  are  those 
of  the  remotest  antiquity,  whose  human  history  is  lost 
from  our  view  in  the  dim  mist  of  ages. 

Three  such  agencies  of  prime  importance  in  the  tran- 
sition from  the  mere  ghost  to  the  fully  developed  god  must 
here  be  mentioned.  They  are  the  rise  of  temples,  of  idols, 
and,  above  all,  of  priesthoods.  Each  of  these  we  must 
now  consider  briefly  but  separately. 

The  origin  of  the  Temple  (s  various  ;  but  all  temples 
may  nevertheless  be  reduced  in  the  last  resort  either  into 
graves  of  the  dead,  or  into  places  where  worship  is 
specially  offered  up  to  them.  This  truth,  which  Mr.  Her- 
bert Spencer  arrived  at  by  examination  of  the  reports  of 
travellers  or  historians,  and  worked  up  in  connection  with 
his  Principles  of  Sociology,  was  independently  arrived  at 
through  quite  a  different  line  of  observation  and  reasoning 
by  Mr.  William  Simpson,  the  well-known  artist  of  the 
Illustrated  London  Nezvs.  Mr.  Simpson  has  probably 
visited  a  larger  number  of  places  of  worship  all  over  the 
world  than  any  other  traveller  of  any  generation  :  and  he 
was  early  impressed  by  the  fact  which  forced  itself  upon  his 
eyes,  that  almost  every  one  of  them,  where  its  origin  could 


11^ 


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,in!i|iu,i"L  L.^nvipB 


Pi^"p»p" 


ORIGIN  OF   TEMPLES. 


75 


be  tracec,  turned  out  to  be  a  tomb  in  one  form  or  an- 
other. He  has  set  forth  the  results  of  his  researches  in 
this  direction  in  several  admirable  papers,  all  of  which,  but 
especially  the  one  entitled  The  Worship  of  Death,  I  can 
■confidently  recommend  to  the  serious  attention  of  students 
of  religion.  They  contain  the  largest  collection  of  in- 
stances in  this  matter  ever  yet  made  ;  and  they  show  be- 
yound  a  doubt  the  aflfiliation  of  the  very  idea  of  a  temple 
on  the  tomb  or  grave  of  some  distinguished  dead  person, 
famous  for  his  power,  his  courage,  or  his  saintliness. 

The  cave  is  probably  the  first  form  of  the  Temple. 
Sometimes  the  dead  man  is  left  in  the  cave  which  he  in- 
habited when  living  ;  an  instance  of  which  we  have  al- 
ready noticed  among  the  Veddahs  of  Ceylon.     In  other 
cases,  where  races  have  outgrown  the  castom  of  cave- 
dwelling,  the  habit  of  cave-burial,  or  rather  of  laying  the 
dead   in   caves   or   in   artificial   grottoes,    still   continues 
through  the  usual  conservatism  of  religious  feeling.     Of- 
ferings are  made  to  the  dead  in  all  these  various  caves  : 
and  here  we  get  the  beginnings  of  cave-temples.     Such 
temples  are  at  first  of  course  either  natural  or  extremely 
rude  ;  but  they  soon  begin  to  be  decorated  with  rough 
frescoes,  as  is  done,  for  example,  by  the  South  African 
Bushmen.     These  frescoes  again  give  rise  in  time  by  slow 
degrees  to  such  gorgeous  works  as  those  of  the  Tombs  of 
the  Kings  at  Thebes  ;  each  of  which  has  attached  to  it  a 
magnificent  temple  as  its  mortuary  chapel.     Sculpture  is 
similarly  employed  on  the  decoration  of  cave-temples  ; 
and  we  get  the  final  result  of  such  artistic  ornament  in 
splendid  cave-temples  like  those  of  EUora.     Both   arts 
were  employed  together  in  the  beautiful  and  interesting 
Etruscan  tomb-temples. 

In  another  class  of  cases,  the  hut  where  the  dead  man 
lived  is  abandoned  at  his  death  by  his  living  relations,  and 
thus  becomes  a  rudimentary  Temple  where  offerings  are 
made  to  him.  This  is  the  case  with  the  Hottentots,  to  take 
an  instance  at  a  very  low  grade  of  culture.     Of  a  New 


r 


76 


THE  ORIGIN  OF  CODS. 


^' 


Guinea  hut-burial,  Mr.  Chalmers  says  :  "  iie  chief  is  bu- 
ried in  the  centre  ;  a  mat  wriS  spread  over  the  grave,  on 
which  I  was  asked  to  sit  until  they  had  a  weeping."  This 
weeping  is  generally  performed  by  women — a  touch  which 
leads  us  on  to  Adonis  and  Osiris  rites,  and  to  the  Chris- 
tian Pieta.  Mr.  Spencer  has  collected  several  other 
excellent  examples.  Thus,  the  Arawaks  place  the  corpse 
in  a  small  boat  and  bury  it  in  the  hut  ;  among  the 
Creeks,  the  habitation  of  the  dead  becomes  his  place 
of  interment;  the  Fantees  likewise  bury  the  dead  person 
in  his  own  house  ;  and  the  Yucatanese  "  as  a  rule 
abandoned  the  house,  and  left  it  uninhabited  after  the 
burial."  I  will  not  multiply  quotations  ;  it  v/ill  be  better 
to  refer  the  reader  to  Mr.  Spencer's  own  pages,  where 
a  sufficient  number  of  confirmatory  examples  are  col- 
lected to  satisfy  any  but  the  most  prejudiced  critic. 
"  As  repeated  supplies  of  food  are  taken  to  the  abandoned 
house,"  says  Mr.  Spencer,  "  and  as  along  with  making 
ofiferings  there  go  other  propitiatory  acts,  the  deserted 
dwelling  house,  turned  into  a  mortuary  house,  acquires 
the  attributes  of  a  temple." 

A  third  origin  for  Temples  is  found  in  the  shed,  hut,  or 
shelter,  erected  over  the  grave,  either  for  the  protection 
of  the  dead  or  for  the  convenience  of  the  living  who  bring 
their  o^erings.  Thus,  in  parts  of  New  Guinea,  according 
to  Mr.  Chalmers,  "  The  natives  bury  their  dead  in  the  front 
of  their  dwellings,  and  cover  the  grave  with  a  small  house^ 
in  which  the  near  relatives  sleep  for  several  months." 

."  Where  house-burial  is  not  practised,"  says  Mr.  Spen- 
cer, once  more,  "  the  sheltering  structure  raised  above  the 
grave,  or  above  the  stage  bearing  the  corpse,  becomes 
the  germ  of  the  sacred  building.  By  some  of  the  New 
Guinea  people  there  is  a  '  roof  of  atap  erected  over '  the 
burial-place.  In  Cook's  time  the  Tahitians  placed  the 
body  of  a  dead  person  i.pon  a  kind  of  bier  supported  by 
sticks  and  under  a  roof.  So,  too,  in  Sumatra,  where  *  a 
shed  is  built  over '  the  grave  ;  and  so,  too,  in  Tonga.     Of 


lb  i 


VARIOUS  TYPES  OP  TEMPLES. 


77 


course  this  shed  admits  of  enlargement  and  finish.  The 
Dyaks  in  some  places  build  mausoleums  like  houses,  i8 
feet  high,  ornamentally  carved,  containing  the  goods  of 
the  departed — sword,  shield,  paddle,  etc.  When  we  read 
that  the  Fijians  deposit  the  bodies  of  their  chiefs  in  small 
enbures  or  temples,  we  may  fairly  conclude  that  these  so- 
called  temples  are  simply  more-developed  sheltering  struc- 
tures. Still  more  clearly  did  the  customs  of  the  Peruvians 
show  that  the  structure  erected  over  the  dead  body  de- 
velops into  a  temple.  Acosta  tells  us  that  *  every  one  of 
these  kings  Yncas  left  all  his  treasure  and  revenues  to  en- 
tertaine  the  place  of  worshippe  where  his  body  was  layed, 
and  there  were  many  ministers  with  all  their  familie  dedi- 
cated to  his  service.'  " 

Note  in  the  last  touch,  by  anticipation,  one  origin  of 
priesthood. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  saw  in  Mr.  Duff  Macdonald's 
account  of  the  Central  African  natives  that  those  savages 
do  not  worship  at  the  actual  grave  itself.  In  this  case, 
terror  of  the  revenant  seems  to  prevent  the  usual  forms  of 
homage  at  the  tomb  of  the  deceased.  Moreover,  the 
ghost  being  now  conceived  as  more  or  less  freely  separable 
from  the  corpse,  it  will  be  possible  to  worship  it  in  some 
place  remote  from  the  dreaded  cemetery.  Hence  these 
Africans  "  seek  the  spirit  at  the  place  where  their  departed 
kinsman  last  lived  among  them.  It  is  the  great  tree  at 
the  verandah  of  the  dead  man's  house  that  is  their  temple  : 
and  if  no  tree  grow  here,  they  erect  a  little  shade,  and 
there  perform  their  simple  rites."  We  have  in  this  case 
yet  another  possible  origin  for  certain  temples,  and  also, 
I  will  add  by  anticipation  of  a  future  chapter,  for  the 
sacred  tree,  which  is  so  common  an  object  of  pious  adora- 
tion in  many  countries. 

Beginning  with  such  natural  caves  or  such  humble  huts, 
the  Temple  assumes  larger  proportions  and  more  beauti- 
ful decorations  with  the  increase  of  art  and  the  growth  of 
kingdoms.     Especially,  as  we  see  in  the  tomb-temples  and 


78 


THE  ORIGIN  OP  CODS. 


i\'' 


pyramids  of  Egypt  and  Peru,  does  it  assume  great  size 
and  acquire  costly  ornaments  when  it  is  built  by  a  power- 
ful king  for  himself  during  his  own  lifetime.  Temple- 
tombs  of  this  description  reach  a  high  point  of  artistic 
development  in  such  a  building  as  the  so-called  Treasury 
of  Atreus  at  Mycenae,  which  is  really  the  sepulchre  of 
some  nameless  prehistoric  monarch.  It  is  admirably  re- 
constructed in  Perrot  and  Chipiez. 

Obviously,  the  importance  and  magnificence  of  the  tem- 
ple will  react  upon  the  popular  conception  of  the  impor- 
tance and  magnificence  of  the  god  who  inhabits  it.     And 
conversely,  as  the  gods  grow  greater  and  greater,  more 
art  and  more  constructive  skill  v/ill  constantly  be  devoted 
to  the  building  and  decoration  of  their  permanent  homes. 
Thus  in  Egypt  the  tomb  was  often  more  carefully  built 
and  splendidly  decorated  than  the  house  ;  because  the 
house  was  inhabited  for  a  short  time  only,  but  the  tomb 
for  eternity.     Moreover,  as  kings  grew  more  powerful, 
they  often  adorned  the  temples  of  their  ancestors  with 
emulous  pride,  to  show  their  own  greatness.     In  Eg^pt, 
once  more,  the  original  part  of  all  the  more  important 
temples  is  but  a  small  dark  cell,  of  early  origin,  to  which 
one  successive  king  after  another  in  later  dynasties  added 
statelier  and  ever  statelier  anted lambers  or  porches,  so 
that  at  last  the  building  assumed  the  gigantic  size  and 
noble  proportions   of  Kamak  and   Luxor.     This  access 
of  importance  to  the  temple  cannot  have  failed  to  add  cor- 
respondingly to  the  dignity  of  the  god  ;  so  that,  as  time 
went  on,  instead  of  the  early  kings  being  forgotten  and 
no  longer  worshipped,   they  assumed  ever  greater  and 
greater  importance  from  the  magnificence  of  the  works  in 
which  their  memory  was  enshrined.     To  the  very  end, 
the  god  depends  largely  on  his  house  for  impressiveness. 
How  much  did  not  Hellenic  religion  itself  owe  to  the  Par- 
thenon and  the  temple  of  Olympian  Zeus  !     How  much 
does  not  Christianity  itself  owe  to  Lincoln  and  Durham, 
to  Amiens  and  Chartres,  to  Milan  and  Pisa,  to  St.  Mark's 


]■ 


ORIGIN  OF  IDOLS. 


79 


and  St.  Peter's  !  Men  cannot  believe  that  the  deities 
worshipped  in  such  noble  and  dimly  religious  shrines  were 
once  human  like  themselves,  compact  of  the  same  bodies, 
parts,  and  r.assions.  Yet  in  the  last  instance  at  least  we 
know  the  ^reat  works  to  be  raised  in  honour  of  a  single 
Lower  Syrian  peasant. 

With  this  brief  and  imperfect  notice  of  the  origin  of 
temples,  which  will  indirectly  be  expanded  in  later  portions 
of  my  work,  I  pass  on  from  the  consideration  of  the  sacred 
building  itself  to  that  of  the  Idol  who  usually  dwells  within 
it. 

Where  burial  prevails,  and  where  arts  are  at  a  low 
stage  of  development,  the  memory  of  the  dead  is  not  likely 
to  survive  beyond  two  or  three  generations.  But  where 
mummification  is  the  rule,  there  is  no  reason  why  deceased 
persons  should  not  be  preserved  and  worshipped  for  an 
indefinite  period  ;  and  we  know  that  in  Egypt  at  least 
the  cult  of  kings  who  died  in  the  most  remote  times  of 
the  Early  Empire  was  carried  on  regularly  down  to  the 
days  of  the  Ptolemies.  In  such  a  case  as  this,  there  is  ab- 
solutely no  need  for  idols  to  arise  ;  the  corpse  itself  is  the 
chief  object  of  worship.  We  do  find  accordingly  that  both 
in  Egypt  and  in  Peru  the  worship  of  the  mummy  played 
a  large  part  in  the  local  religions  ;  though  sometimes  it 
alternated  with  the  worship  of  other  holy  objects,  such  as 
the  image  or  the  sacred  stone,  which  we  shall  see  hereafter 
to  have  had  a  like  origin.  But  in  many  other  countries, 
where  bodies  were  less  visibly  and  obviously  preserved, 
the  worship  due  to  the  ghost  or  god  was  often  paid  to  a 
simulacrum  or  idol  ;  so  much  so  that  "  idolatry  "  has  be- 
come in  Christian  parlance  the  common  term  for  most 
forms  of  worship  other  than  monotheistic. 

Now  what  is  the  origin  and  meaning  of  Idols,  and  how 
can  they  be  affiliated  upon  primitive  corpse  or  ghost 
worship  ? 

Like  the  temple,  the  Idol.  I  believe,  has  many  separate 
origins,  several  of  which  have  been  noted  by  Mr.  Herbert 


^1    ll.l 


80 


THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


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Spencer,  while  others,  it  seems  to  me,  have  escaped  the 
notice  even  of  that  profound  and  acute  observer. 

The  earliest  Idols,  if  I  may  be  allowed  the  contradictory 
expression,  are  not  idols  at  all — not  images  or  representa- 
tions of  the  dead  person,  but  actual  bodies,  preserved  and 
mummified.  These  pass  readily,  however,  into  various 
types  of  representative  figures.  For  in  the  first  place  the 
mummy  itself  is  usually  wrapped  round  in  swathing-cloths 
which  obscure  its  features  ;  and  in  ':he  second  place  it  is 
frequently  enclosed  in  a  wooden  mummy-case,  which  is 
itself  most  often  rudely  human  in  form,  and  which  has 
undoubtedly  given  rise  to  certain  forms  of  idols.  Thus, 
the  images  of  Amun,  Khem,  Osiris,  and  Ptah  among 
Egyptian  gods  are  frequently  or  habitually  those  of  a 
mummy  in  a  mummy-case.  But  furthermore,  the  mummy 
itself  is  seldom  or  never  the  entire  man  ;  the  intestines  at 
least  have  been  removed,  or  even,  as  in  New  Guinea,  the 
entire  mass  of  flesh,  leaving  only  the  skin  and  the  skeleton. 
The  eyes,  again,  are  often  replaced,  as  in  Peru,  by  some 
other  imitative  object,  so  as  to  keep  up  the  lifelike  ap- 
pearance. Cases  like  these  lead  on  to  others,  where  the 
image  or  idol  gradually  supersedes  altogether  the  corpse 
or  mummy. 

Mr.  H.  O.  Forbes  gives  an  interesting  instance  of  such 
a  transitional  stage  in  Timor-laut.  "  The  bodies  of  those 
who  die  in  war  or  by  a  violent  death  are  buried,"  he  says  ; 
"  and  if  the  head  has  been  captured  [by  the  enemy] ,  a 
cocoanut  is  placed  in  the  grave  to  represent  the  missing 
member,  and  to  deceive  and  satisfy  his  spirit."  There  is 
abundant  evidence  that  such  makeshift  limbs  or  bodies 
amply  suf^ce  for  the  use  of  the  soul,  when  the  ?.ctual  corpse 
has  been  destroyed  or  mutilated.  Sometimes,  indeed, 
the  substitution  of  parts  is  deliberate  and  intentional. 
Landa  says  of  the  Yucatanese  that  they  cut  off  the  heads 
of  the  ancient  lords  of  Cocom  when  they  died,  and  cleared 
them  from  flesh  by  cooking  them  (very  probably  to  eat 
at  a  sacrificial  feast,  of  which  more  hereafter)  ;  then  they 


FROM  MUMMY  TO  IDOL.  gl 

sawed  off  the  top  of  the  skull,  filled  in  the  rest  of  the  head 
with  cement,  and,  making  the  face  as  like  as  possible  to 
the  original  possessor,  kept  these  images  along  with  the 
statues  and  the  ashes.  Note  here  the  usual  preservation 
of  the  head  as  exceptionally  sacred.  In  other  cases,  they 
made  for  their  fathers  wooden  statues,  put  in  the  ashes  of 
the  burnt  body,  and  attached  the  skin  of  the  occiput  taken 
off  the  corpse.  These  images,  half  mummy,  half  idol, 
were  kept  in  the  oratories  of  their  houses,  and  were  greatly 
reverenced  and  assiduously  cared  for.  On  all  the  festivals, 
food  and  drink  were  offered  to  them. 

Mr.  Spencer  has  collected  other  interesting  instances  of 
this  transitional  stage  between  the  corpse  or  mummy  and 
the  mere  idol.  The  Mexicans,  who  were  cremationists, 
used  to  burn  a  dead  lord,  and  collect  the  ashes  ;  "  and  after 
kneading  them  with  human  blood,  they  made  of  them  an 
image  of  the  deceased,  which  was  kept  in  memory  of  him." 
Sometimes,  as  in  Yucatan,  the  ashes  were  placed  in  a 
man-shaped  receptacle  of  clay,  and  temples  or  oratories 
were  erected  over  them.  "  In  yet  other  cases,"  says  Mr. 
Spencer,  "  there  is  worship  of  the  relics,  joined  with  the 
representative  figure,  not  by  inclusion,  but  only  by  proxi- 
mity." Thus  Gomara  tells  us  that  the  Mexicans  having 
burnt  the  body  of  their  deceased  king,  gathered  up  the 
ashes,  bones,  jewels,  and  gold  in  cloths,  and  made  a  figure 
dressed  as  a  man,  before  which,  as  well  as  before  the  relics, 
offerings  were  placed.  It  is  clear  that  cremation  specially 
lends  itself  to  such  substitution  of  an  image  for  the  actual 
dead  body.  Among  burying  races  it  is  the  severed  skull, 
on  the  contrary,  that  is  oftenest  preserved  and  worshipped. 

The  transition  from  such  images  to  small  stone  sarco- 
phagi, like  those  of  the  Etruscan  tombs,  is  by  no  means  a 
great  one.  These  sarcophagi  contained  the  burnt  ashes 
of  the  dead,  but  were  covered  by  a  lid  which  usually  rep- 
resented the  deceased,  reclining,  as  if  at  a  banquet,  with  a 
beaker  in  his  hands.  The  tombs  in  which  the  sarcophagi 
were  placed  were  of  two  types  ;  one,  the  stone  pyramid 


IMAGE  EVALUATION 
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THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


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or  cone,  which,  says  Dr.  Isaac  Taylor,  "  is  manifestly  a 
survival  of  the  turnulus";  the  other,  the  rock-cut  chamber, 
"  which  is  a  survival  of  the  cave."  These  lordly  graves 
are  no  mere  cheerless  sepulchres  ;  they  are  abodes  for  the 
dead,  constructed  on  the  model  of  the  homes  of  the  living. 
They  contain  furniture  and  pottery  ;  and  their  walls  are 
decorated  with  costly  mural  paintings.  They  are  also 
usually  provided  with  an  antechamber,  where  the  family 
could  assemble  at  the  annual  feast  to  do  homage  to  the 
spirits  of  departed  ancestors,  who  shared  in  the  meal  from 
their  sculptured  sarcophagus  lids. 

At  a  further  stage  of  distance  from  the  primitive 
mummy-idol  we  come  upon  the  image  pure  and  simple. 
The  Mexicans,  for  example,  as  we  have  seen,  were  cre- 
mationists  ;  and  when  men  killed  in  battle  were  missing, 
they  made  wooden  figures  of  them,  which  they  honoured, 
and  then  burnt  them  in  place  of  the  bodies.  In  somewhat 
the  same  spirit  the  Egyptians  used  to  place  beside  the 
mummy  itself  an  image  of  the  dead,  to  act  as  a  refuge  or 
receptacle  for  the  soul,  "  in  case  of  the  accidental  destruc- 
tion of  the  actual  body."  So  the  Mexicans  once  more,  if 
one  of  their  merchants  died  on  gi  journey,  were  accustomed 
to  make  a  statue  of  wood  in  the  shape  of  the  deceased, 
to  which  they  paid  all  the  honours  they  would  have  done 
to  his  actual  corpse  before  burning  it.  In  Africa,  while 
a  king  of  Congfo  is  being  embalmed,  a  figure  is  set  up  in 
the  palace  to  represent  him,  and  is  daily  furnished  with 
food  and  drink.  Mr.  Spencer  has  collected  several  similar 
instances  of  idols  substituted  for  the  bodies  of  the  dead. 
The  Roman  imagines  wore  masks  of  wax,  which  preserved 
in  like  manner  the  features  of  ancestors.  Perhaps  the 
most  curious  modern  survival  of  this  custom  of  double 
representations  is  to  be  found  in  the  effigies  of  our  kings 
and  queens  still  preserved  in  Westminster  Abbey. 

There  are  two  other  sources  of  idol-worship,  however, 
which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  have  hardly  received  sufficient 
attention  at  Mr.  Spencer's  hands.    Those  two  are  the  stake 


I 


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EVOLUTION  OF   THE  STONE  STATUE. 


83 


^ 


which  marks  the  grave,  and  the  standing  stone  or  tomb- 
stone. By  far  the  larger  number  of  idols,  I  venture  to 
believe,  are  descended  from  one  or  other  of  these  two 
originals,  both  of  which  I  shall  examine  hereafter  in  far 
greater  detail.  There  is  indeed  no  greater  lacuna,  I  fancy, 
in  Mr.  Spencer's  monumental  work  than  that  produced 
by  the  insufficient  consideration  of  these  two  fruitful 
sources  of  worshipful  objects.  I  shall  therefore  devote  a 
considerable  space  to  their  consideration  in  subsequent 
chapters  ;  for  the  present  it  will  suffice  to  remark  that  the 
wooden  stake  seems  often  to  form  the  origin  or  point  of 
departure  for  the  carved  wooden  image,  as  well  as  for 
such  ruder  objects  of  reverence  as  the  cones  and  wooden 
pillars  so  widely  reverenced  among  the  Semitic  tribes  ; 
while  the  rough  boulder,  standing  stone  or  tombstone 
seems  to  form  the  origin  or  point  of  departure  for  the 
stone  or  marble  statue,  the  commonest  type  of  idol  the 
whole  world  over  in  all  advanced  and  cultivated  communi- 
ties. Such  stones  were  at  first  mere  rude  blocks  or  un- 
hewn masses,  the  descendants  of  those  which  were  rolled 
over  the  grave  in  primitive  times  in  order  to  keep  down 
the  corpse  of  the  dead  man,  and  prevent  him  from  return- 
ing to  disturb  the  living.  But  in  time  they  grew  to  be 
roughly  dressed  into  slabs  or  squares,  and  finally  to  be 
decorated  with  a  rude  representation  of  a  human  head  and 
shoulders.  From  this  stage  they  readily  progressed  to 
that  of  the  Greek  Hermae.  We  now  know. that  this  was 
the  early  shape  of  most  Hellenic  gods  and  goddesses  ;  and 
we  can  trace  their  evolution  onward  from  this  point  to  the 
wholly  anthropomorphic  Aphrodite  or  Here.  The  well- 
known  figure  of  the  Ephesian  Artemis  is  an  intermediate 
case  which  will  occur  at  once  to  every  classical  reader. 
Starting  from  such  shapeless  beginnings,  we  progress  at 
last  to  the  artistic  and  splendid  bronze  and  marble  statues 
of  Hellas,  Etruria,  and  Rome,  to  the  many-handed  deitif.s 
of  modern  India,  and  to  the  sculptured  Madonnas  and 
Pietas  of  Renaissance  Italy. 


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84 


THE  ORIGIN  or  GODS. 


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Naturally,  as  the  gods  grow  more  beautiful  and  more 
artistically  finished  in  workmanship,  the  popular  idea  of 
their  power  and  dignity  must  increase  pari  passu.  In 
Egypt,  this  increase  took  chiefly  the  form  of  colossal  size 
and  fine  manipulation  of  hard  granitic  materials.  The  so- 
called  Memnon  and  the  Sphinx  are  familiar  instances  of 
the  first  ;  the  Pashts  of  Syenite,  the  black  basalt  gods,  so 
well  known  at  the  Louvre  and  the  British  Museum,  are 
examples  of  the  second.  In  Greece,  effect  was  sought 
rather  by  ideal  beauty,  as  in  the  Aphrodites  and  Apollos, 
or  by  costliness  of  material,  as  in  the  chryselephantine 
Zeus  and  the  Athene  of  the  Parthenon.  But  we  must 
always  remember  that  in  Hellas  itself  these  glorious  gods 
were  developed  in  a  comparatively  short  space  of  time 
from  the  shapeless  blocks  or  standing  stones  of  the  ruder 
religion  ;  indeed,  we  have  still  many  curious  intermediate 
forms  between  the  extremely  grotesque  and  hardly  human 
Mycenaean  types,  and  the  exquisite  imaginings  of  Myron 
or  Phidias.  The  earliest  Hellenic  idols  engraved  by 
Messrs.  Perrot  and  Chiplez  in  their  great  work  on  Art  in 
Primitive  Greece  do  not  rise  in  any  respect  superior  to  the 
Polynesian  level ;  while  the  so-called  Apollos  of  later 
archaic  workmanship,  rigidly  erect  with  their  arms  at  their 
sides,  recall  in  many  respects  the  straight  up-and-down 
outline  of  the  standing  stone  from  which  they  are  de- 
veloped. 

I  should  add  that  in  an  immense  number  of  instances 
the  rude  stone  image  or  idol,  and  at  a  still  lower  grade 
the  unwrought  sacred  stone,  stands  as  the  central  object 
under  a  shed  or  shelter,  which  develops  by  degrees  into 
the  stately  temple.  The  advance  in  both  is  generally 
more  or  less  parallel  ;  though  sometimes,  as  in  historical 
Greece,  a  temple  of  the  noblest  architecture  encloses  as  its 
central  and  principal  object  of  veneration  the  rough  un- 
hewn stone  of  early  barbaric  worship.  So  even  in  Chris- 
tendom, great  churches  and  cathedrals  often  hold  as  their 
most  precious  possession  some  rude  and  antique  image 


\: 


r 


j^ 


MULTIPLICATION  OF  IMAGES. 


85 


like  the  sacred  Bambino  of  Santa  Maria  in  Ara  Coeli  at 
Rome,  or  the  "  Black  Madonnas  "  which  are  revered  by 
the  people  at  so  many  famous  Italian  places  of  pilgrimage. 
Nor  do  I  mean  to  say  that  every  Idol  is  necessarily  it- 
self a  funereal  relic.  When  once  the  idea  of  godship  has 
been  thoroughly  developed,  and  when  men  have  grown 
accustomed  to  regard  an  image  or  idol  as  the  representa- 
tive or  dwelling-place  of  their  god,  it  is  easy  to  multiply 
such  images  indefinitely.  Hundreds  of  repiesentations 
may  exist  of  the  self-same  Apollo  or  Aphrodite  or  Ma- 
donna or  St.  Sebastian.  At  the  same  time,  it  is  quite  clear 
that  for  most  worshippers,  the  divine  being  is  more  or  less 
actually  confused  with  the  image  ;  a  particular  Artemis 
or  a  particular  Notre  Dame  is  thought  of  as  more  power- 
ful or  more  friendly  than  another.  I  have  known  women 
in  Southern  Europe  go  to  pray  at  the  shrine  of  a  distant 
Madonna,  "  because  she  is  greater  than  our  own  Ma- 
donna." Moreover,  it  is  probable  that  in  many  cases 
images  or  sacred  stones  once  funereal  in  origin,  and  re- 
presenting particular  gods  or  ghosts,  have  been  swallowed 
up  at  last  by  other  and  more  powerful  deities,  so  as  to  lose 
in  the  end  their  primitive  distinctness.  Thus,  there  were 
many  Baals  and  many  Ashteroths  ;  probably  there  were 
many  Apollos,  many  Artemises,  many  Aphrodites.  It  is 
almost  certain  that  there  were  many  distinct  Hermae. 
The  progress  of  research  tends  to  make  us  realise  that 
numberless  deities,  once  considered  unique  and  individual, 
may  be  resolved  into  a  whole  host  of  local  gods,  after- 
wards idencified  with  some  powerful  deity  on  the  merest 
external  resemblances  of  image,  name,  or  attribute.  In 
Egypt  at  least  this  process  of  identification  and  centrali- 
sation was  common.  Furthermore,  we  know  that  each 
new  religion  tends  to  swallow  up  and  assimilate  to  itself 
all  possible  elements  of  older  cults  ;  just  as  Hebrew 
Jahwehii'm  tried  to  adopt  the  sacred  stones  of  early 
Semitic  ;ieathenism  by  associating  them  with  episodes  in 
the  history  of  the  patriarchs  ;  and  just  as  Christianity  has 


86 


THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


!  II 


:f 


II   I 


H      i 


|!|  '< 


I      I 


sanctified  such  stones  in  its  own  area  by  using  them  some- 
times as  the  base  of  a  cross,  or  by  consecrating  them  at 
others  with  the  name  of  some  saint  or  martyr. 

But  even  more  than  the  evolution  of  the  Temple  and  the 
Idol,  the  evolution  of  the  Priesthood  has  given  dignity, 
importance,  and  power  to  the  gods.  For  the  priests  are 
a  class  whose  direct  interest  it  is  to  make  the  most  of  the 
greatness  and  majesty  of  the  deities  they  tend  or  worship. 

Priesthood,  again,  has  probably  at  least  two  distinct 
origins.  The  one  is  quasi-royal  ;  the  other  is  quasi- 
servile. 

I  begin  with  the  first.  We  saw  that  the  chief  of  an 
African  village,  as  the  son  and  representative  of  the  chief 
ghosts,  who  are  the  tribal  gods,  has  alone  the  right  to  ap- 
proach them  directly  with  oflferings.  The  inferior  villager, 
who  desires  to  ask  anything  of  the  gods,  asks  through 
the  chief,  who  is  a  kinsman  and  friend  of  the  divine  spirits, 
and  who  therefore  naturally  understands  their  ideas  and 
habits.  Such  chiefs  are  thus  also  naturally  priests.  They 
are  sacred  by  family  ;  they  and  their  children  stand  in  a 
special  relation  to  the  gods  of  the  tribe,  quite  different 
from  the  relation  in  which  the  common  people  stand  ; 
they  are  of  the  blood  of  the  deities.  This  type  of  relation 
is  common  in  many  countries  ;  the  chiefs  in  such  instances 
are  "  kings  and  priests,  after  the  order  of  Melchizedek." 

To  put  it  briefly,  in  the  earliest  or  domestic  form  of  re- 
ligion, the  gods  of  each  little  group  or  family  are  its  own 
dead  ancestors,  and  especially  (while  the  historic  memory 
is  still  but  weak)  its  immediate  predecessors.  In  this 
stage,  the  head  of  the  household  naturally  discharges  the 
functions  of  priest  ;  it  is  he  who  approaches  the  family 
ghosts  or  gods  on  behalf  of  his  wives,  his  sons,  his  de- 
pendants. To  the  last,  indeed,  the  father  of  each  family 
retains  this  priestly  function  as  regards  the  more  restricted 
family  rites  ;  he  is  priest  of  the  worship  of  the  lares  and 
penates;  he  offers  the  family  sacrifice  to  the  family  gods; 
he  reads  family  prayers  in  the  Christian  household.     But 


i 


THE  KING  AS  PRIEST. 


87 


as  the  tribe  or  nation  arises,  and  chieftainship  grows 
greater,  it  is  the  ghosts  or  ancestors  of  the  chiefly  or  kingly 
family  who  develop  most  into  gods  ;  and  the  living  chief 
and  his  kin  are  their  natural  representatives.  Thus,  in 
most  cases,  the  priestly  office  comes  to  be  associated  with 
that  of  king  or  chief.  Indeed,  we  shall  see  hereafter  in 
a  subsequent  chapter  that  many  kings,  being  the  descend- 
ants of  gods,  are  gods  themselves  ;  and  that  this  union 
of  the  kingly  and  divine  characters  has  much  to  do  with 
the  growth  of  the  dignity  of  godhead.  Here,  however, 
I  waive  this  point  for  the  present  ;  it  will  suffice  for  us 
to  note  at  the  present  stage  of  our  argument  that  in  a  large 
number  of  instances  the  priesthood  and  the  kingship  were 
inherent  and  hereditary  in  the  self-same  families. 

"  The  union  of  a  royal  title  with  priestly  duties,"  says 
Mr.  Frazer  in  The  Golden  Bough,  "  was  common  in  ancient 
Italy  and  Greece.  At  Rome  and  in  other  Italian  cities 
there  was  a  priest  called  the  Sacrificial  King  or  King  of 
the  sacred  rites  (Rex  SacriUculus  or  Rex  Sacrorum),  and  his 
wife  bore  the  title  of  Queen  of  the  Sacred  Rites.  In  re- 
publican Athens,  the  second  magistrate  of  the  s^ate  was 
called  the  King,  and  his  wife  the  Queen  ;  the  functions  of 
both  were  religious.  Many  other  Greek  democracies  had 
titular  kings,  whose  duties,  so  far  as  they  are  known,  seem 
to  have  been  priestly.  At  Rome  the  tradition  was  that  the 
Sacrificial  King  had  been  appointed  after  the  expulsion 
of  the  kings  in  order  to  offer  the  sacrifices  which  had  been 
previously  ofifered  by  the  kings.  In  Greece  a  similar  view 
appears  to  have  prevailed  as  to  the  origin  of  the  priestly 
kings.  In  itself  the  view  is  not  improbable,  and  it  is  borne 
out  by  the  example  of  Sparta,  the  only  purely  Greek  state 
which  retained  the  kingly  form  of  government  in  histori- 
cal times.  For  in  Sparta  all  state  sacrifices  were  oflfered 
by  the  kings  as  descendants  of  the  god.  This  combina- 
tion of  priestly  functions  with  royal  authority  is  familiar 
to  every  one.  Aiia  Minor,  for  example,  was  the  seat  of 
various  great  religious  capitals,  peopled  by  thousands  of 


I'!   ' 


88 


THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


W  ] 


I  I. 


I      I 

I,    ' 

'ii        : 


1^  i 

I     I 


'  Sacred  slaves,'  and  ruled  by  pontiffs  who  wielded  at  once 
temporal  and  spiritual  authority,  like  the  popes  of  mediae- 
val Rome.  Such  priest-ridden  cities  were  Zela  and  Pes- 
sinus.  Teutonic  Kings,  again,  in  the  old  heathen  days 
seem  to  have  stood  in  the  position  and  exercised  the 
powers  of  high  priests.  The  Emperors  of  China  oflfer 
public  sacrifices,  the  details  of  which  are  regulated  by  the, 
ritual  books.  It  is  needless,  however,  to  multiply  exam- 
ples of  what  is  the  rule  rather  than  the  exception  in  the 
early  history  of  the  kingship." 

We  will  return  hereafter  in  another  connexion  to  this 
ancient  relation  of  kingship  with  priesthood,  which  arises 
naturally  from  the  still  more  ancient  relation  of  the  king  to 
the  god. 

Where  priesthood  originates  in  this  particular  way,  little 
differentiation  is  likely  to  occur  between  the  temporal  and 
the  ecclesiastical  power.  But  there  is  a  second  and  far 
more  potent  origin  of  priesthood,  less  distinguished  in  its 
beginnings,  yet  more  really  pregnant  of  great  results  in  the 
end.  For  where  the  king  is  a  priest,  and  the  descendant 
of  the  gods,  as  in  Peru  and  Egypt,  his  immediate  and 
human  power  seems  to  overshadow  and  as  it  were  to  be- 
little the  power  of  his  divine  ancestors.  No  statue  of 
Osiris,  for  example,  is  half  so  big  in  size  as  the  colossal 
figure  of  Rameses  II.  which  lies  broken  in  huge  pieces 
outside  the  mortuary  temple  of  the  king  it  commemorates, 
among  the  ruins  of  Thebes.  But  where  a  separate  and 
distinct  priesthood  gets  the  management  of  sacred  rites 
entirely  into  its  own  hands,  we  find  the  authority  of  the 
gods  often  rising  superior  to  that  of  the  kings,  who  are 
onlv  their  vicegerents  :  till  at  last  we  get  Popes  dictating 
to  emperors,  and  powerful  monarchs  doing  humble 
penance  before  the  costly  shrine^  of  murdered  archbishops. 

The  origin  of  independent  or  quasi-servile  priesthood 
is  to  be  found  in  the  institution  of  "  temple  slaves," — ^the 
attendants  told  off  as  we  have  already  seen  to  do  duty 
at  the  grave  of  the  chief  or  dead  warrior.     Egypt,  again 


I 


^ 


;l 


GROWTH  OF  THE  PRIESTHOOD. 


89 


I 


affords  us,  on  the  domestic  side,  an  admirable  example  of 
the  origin  of  such  priesthoods.  Over  the  lintel  ol  each 
of  the  cave-like  tombs  at  Beni  Hassan  and  Sakkarah  is 
usually  placed  an  inscription  setting  forth  the  name  and 
titles  of  its  expected  occupant  (for  each  was  built  during 
the  life-time  of  its  owner),  with  an  invocation  praying  for 
him  propitious  funeral  rites,  and  a  good  burial-place  after 
a  long  and  happy  life.  Then  follows  a  pious  hope  that  the 
spirit  may  enjoy  for  all  eternity  the  proper  payment  of 
funereal  offerings,  a  list  of  which  is  ordinarily  appended, 
together  with  a  statement  of  the  various  anniversaries  on 
which  they  were  due.  But  the  point  which  specially  con- 
cerns us  here  is  this  :  Priests  or  servants  were  appointed 
to  see  that  these  offerings  were  duly  made  ;  and  the  tomb 
was  endowed  with  property  for  the  purpose  both  of 
keeping  up  the  offerings  in  question,  and  of  providing  a 
stipend  or  living-wage  for  the  priest.  As  we  shall  see 
hereafter,  such  priesthoods  were  generally  made  heredi- 
tary, so  as  to  ensure  their  continuance  throughout  all  time : 
and  so  successful  were  they  that  in  many  cases  worship 
continued  to  be  performed  for  several  hundred  years 
at  the  tomb  ;  so  that  a  person  who  died  under  the  Early 
Empire  was  still  being  made  the  recipient  of  funeral  dues 
under  kings  of  the  Eighteenth  and  Nineteenth  Dynasties. 
I  give  this  interesting  historical  instance  at  some  length 
because  it  is  one  of  the  best  known,  and  also  one  of  the 
most  persistent.  But  everywhere,  all  the  world  over, 
similar  evolutions  have  occurred  on  a  shorter  scale.  The 
temple  attendants,  endowed  for  the  purpose  of  performing 
sacred  rites  for  the  ghost  or  god,  have  grown  into  priests, 
who  knew  the  habits  of  the  unseen  denizen  of  the  shrine. 
Bit  by  bit,  prescriptions  have  arisen  ;  customs  and  rituals 
have  developed  ;  and  the  priests  have  become  the  de- 
positaries of  the  divine  traditions.  They  alone  know  how 
to  approach  the  god  ;  they  alone  can  read  the  hidden 
signs  of  his  pleasure  or  displeasure.  As  intermediaries 
between  worshipper  and  deity,  they  are  themselves  half 


90 


THE  ORIGIN  01-  GODS. 


it 


I' t 


sacred.  Without  them,  no  votary  can  rightly  approach 
the  shrine  of  his  patron.  Thus  at  last  they  rise  into  im- 
portance far  above  their  origin  ;  priestcraft  comes  into  be- 
ing ;  and  by  magnifying  their  god,  the  members  of  the 
hierarchy  magnify  at  the  same  time  their  own  oflice  and 
function. 

Yet  another  contributing  cause  must  be  briefly  noted. 
Picture-writing  and  hieroglyphics  take  their  rise  more 
especially  in  connexion  with  tombs  and  temples.  The 
priests  in  particular  hold  as  a  rule  the  key  to  this  know- 
ledge. In  ancient  Egypt,  to  take  a  well-known  instance, 
they  were  the  learned  class;  they  became  the  learned  class 
again  under  other  circumstances  in  mediaeval  Europe. 
Everywhere  we  come  upon  sacred  mysteries  that  the 
priests  alone  know;  and  where  hieroglyphics  exist,  these 
mysteries,  committed  to  wiiting,  become  the  peculiar 
property  of  the  priests  in  a  more  special  sense.  Where 
writing  is  further  differentiated  into  hieratic  and  demotic, 
the  gulf  between  laity  and  priesthood  grows  still  wider; 
the  priests  possess  a  special  key  to  knowledge,  denied  to 
the  commonalty.  The  recognition  of  Sacred  Books  has 
often  the  same  result;  of  these,  the  priests  are  naturally 
the  guardians  and  exponents.  I  need  hardly  add  that 
side  by  side  with  the  increase  of  architectural  grandeur  in 
the  temple,  and  the  increase  of  artistic  beauty  and  costli- 
ness in  the  idols  or  statues  and  pictures  of  the  gods,  goes 
increase  in  the  stai  'iness  of  the  priestly  robes,  the  priestly 
surroundings,  the  priestly  ritual.  Finally,  we  get  cere- 
monies of  the  most  dignified  character,  adorned  with  all 
the  accessories  of  painting  and  sculpture,  of  candles  and 
flowers,  of  incense  and  music,  of  rich  mitres  and  jewelled 
palls, — ceremonies  performed  in  the  dim  shade  of  lofty 
temples,  or  mosques,  or  churches,  in  honour  of  god  or 
gods  of  infinite  might,  power,  and  majesty,  who  must  yet 
in  the  last  resort  be  traced  back  to  some  historic  or  pre- 
historic Dead  Man,  or  at  least  to  some  sacred  stone  or 
stake  or  image,  his  relic  and  representative. 


APOTHEOSIS  OF  THE  DEAD  MAN. 


91 


Thus,  by  convergence  of  all  these  streams,  the  primitive 
mummy  or  ghost  or  spirit  passes  gradually  into  a  deity  of 
unbounded  glory  and  greatness  and  sanctity.  The  bodi- 
less soul,  released  from  necessary  limits  of  space  and  time, 
envisaged  as  a  god,  is  pictured  as  ever  more  and  more 
superhuman,  till  all  memory  of  its  origin  is  entirely  for- 
gotten. But  to  the  last,  observe  this  curious  point:  all 
new  gods  or  saints  or  divine  persons  are,  each  as  they  crop 
up  first,  of  demonstrably  human  origin.  Whenever  we 
find  a  new  god  added  from  known  sources  to  a  familiar 
pantheon,  we  find  without  exception  that  he  turns  out  to 
be — a  human  being.  Whenever  we  go  back  to  very 
primitive  religions,  we  find  all  men's  gods  are  the  corpses 
or  ghosts  of  their  ancestors.  It  is  only  when  we  take 
relatively  advanced  races  with  unknown  early  histories 
that  we  find  them  worshipping  a  certain  number  of  gods 
who  cannot  be  easily  and  immediately  resolved  into  dead 
men  or  spirits.  Unfortunately,  students  of  religion  have 
oftenest  paid  the  closest  attention  to  those  historical  re- 
ligions which  lie  furthest  away  from  the  primitive  type, 
and  in  which  at  their  first  appearance  before  us  we  come 
upon  the  complex  idea  of  godhead  already  fully  developed. 
Hence  they  are  too  much  inclined,  like  Professor  Robert- 
son Smith,  and  even  sometimes  Mr.  Frazer  (whose  name, 
however,  I  cannot  mention  in  passing  without  the  pro- 
foundest  respect),  to  regard  the  idea  of  a  godship  as 
primordial,  not  derivative  ;  and  to  neglect  the  obvious 
derivation  of  godhead  as  a  whole  from  the  cult  and  reve- 
rence of  the  deified  ancestor.  Yet  the  moment  we  get 
away  from  these  advanced  and  too  overlaid  historical  re- 
ligions to  the  early  conceptions  of  simple  savages,  we  see 
at  once  that  no  gods  exist  for  them  save  the  ancestral 
corpses  or  ghosts;  that  religion  means  the  performance 
of  certain  rites  and  offerings  to  these  corpses  or  ghosts  ; 
and  that  higher  elemental  or  departmental  deities  are 
wholly  wanting.  Even  in  the  great  historical  religions 
themselves,  the  further  back  we  go,  and  the  lower  down 


92 


THE  ORIGIN  OF  GODS. 


l): 


It'  '^ 
i.  I 


we  probe,  the  closer  do  we  come  to  the  foundation-stratum 
of  ghosts  or  ancestor-gods.  And  where,  as  in  Egypt,  the 
evidence  is  oldest  and  most  complete  throughout,  the 
more  do  we  observe  how  the  mystic  nature-gods  of  the 
later  priestly  conceptions  yield,  as  we  go  back  age  by  age 
in  time,  to  the  simpler  and  more  purely  human  ancestral 
gods  of  the  earliest  documents. 

It  will  be  our  task  in  the  succeeding  chapters  of  this 
work  to  do  even  more  than  this — to  show  that  the  ap- 
parently unresolvable  element  in  later  religions,  including 
the  Hebrew  god  Jahweh  himself,  can  be  similarly  affiliated 
by  no  uncertain  evidence  upon  the  primitive  conception 
of  a  ghost  or  ancestor. 


14 


m 


M 


SACRED  STONES. 


93 


CHAPTER  V. 


SACRED     STONES. 


I  MENTIONED  in  the  last  chapter  two  origins  of  Idols 
to  which,  as  I  believed,  an  insufficient  amount  of  attention 
had  been  directed  by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer.  These  were 
the  Sacred  Stone  and  the  Wooden  Stake  which  mark  the 
grave.  To  these  two  I  will  now  add  a  third  common  ob- 
ject of  worship,  which  does  not  indeed  enter  into  the  gene- 
sis of  idols,  but  which  is  of  very  high  importance  in  early 
religion — the  sacred  tree,  with  its  collective  form,  the 
sacred  grove.  All  the  objects  thus  enumerated  demand 
further  attention  at  our  hands,  both  from  their  general 
significance  in  the  history  of  religion,  and  also  from  their 
special  interest  in  connexion  with  the  evolution  of  the 
God  of  Israel,  who  became  in  due  time  the  God  of  Chris- 
tianity and  of  Islam,  as  well  as  the  God  of  modern  idealised 
and  sublimated  theism. 

I  will  begin  with  he  consideration  of  the  Sacre  tone, 
not  only  because  it  is  by  far  the  most  important  ot  the 
three,  but  also  because,  as  we  shall  shortly  see,  it  stands 
in  the  direct  line  of  parentage  of  the  God  of  Israel. 

All  the  world  over,  and  at  all  periods  of  history,  we  find 
among  the  most  common  objects  of  human  worship  cer- 
tain blocks  of  stone,  either  rudely  shaped  and  dressed  by 
the  hand,  or  else  more  often  standing  alone  on  the  soil  in 
all  their  native  and  natural  roughness.  The  downs  of  Eng- 
land ire  everywhere  studded  with  cromlechs,  dolmens,  and 
other  antique  megalithic  structures  (of  which  the  gigantic 
trilithoflis  of  Stonehenge  and  Avebury  are  the  best-known 


94 


SACRED  STONES. 


■s 


1 


I  'I. 


Il  • 


il  ■ 

I         i 
!    ' 

;    ; 

i' 

examples),  long  described  by  antiquaries  as  "  druidical 
remains,"  and  certainly  regarded  by  the  ancient  inhabi- 
tants of  Britain  with  an  immense  amount  of  respect  and 
reverence.  In  France  we  have  the  endless  avenues  of 
Carnac  and  Locmariaker;  in  Sardinia,  the  curious  conical 
shafts  known  to  the  local  peasants  as  sepolture  dei  giganti — 
the  tombs  of  the  giants.  In  Syria,  Major  Conder  has  de- 
scribed similar  monuments  in  Heth  and  Moab,  at  Gilboa 
and  at  Heshbon.  In  India,  five  stones  are  set  up  at  the  cor- 
ner of  a  field,  painted  red,  and  worshipped  by  the  natives  as 
the  Five  Pandavas.  Theophrastus  tells  us  as  one  of  the  cha- 
racteristics of  the  superstitious  man  that  he  anoints  with  oil 
the  sacred  stones  at  the  street  corners;  and  from  an  an- 
cient tradition  embedded  in  the  Hebrew  scriptures  we 
learn  how  the  patriarch  Jacob  set  up  a  stone  at  Bethel  "  for 
a  pillar,"  and  "  poured  oil  upon  the  top  of  it,"  as  a  like  act 
of  worship.  Even  in  our  own  day  there  is  a  certain  Eng- 
lish hundred  where  the  old  open-air  court  of  the  manor  is 
inaugurated  by  the  ceremony  of  breaking  a  bottle  oi  wine 
over  a  standing  stone  which  tops  a  tumulus  ;  and  the 
sovereigns  of  the  United  Kingdom  are  still  crowned  in  a 
chair  which  encloses  under  its  Leat  the  ancestral  sacred 
stone  of  their  heathen  Scottish  and  Irish  predecessors. 

Now,  what  is  the  share  of  such  sacred  stones  in  the  rise 
and  growth  of  the  religious  habit  ? 

It  is  hardly  necessary,  I  suppose,  to  give  formal  proof 
of  the  familiar  fact  that  an  upright  slab  is  one  of  the  com- 
monest modes  of  marking  the  place  where  a  person  is 
buried.  From  the  ancient  pillar  that  prehistoric  savages 
set  up  over  the  tumulus  of  their  dead  chief,  to  the  head- 
stone that  marks  the  dwarfed  and  stunted  barrow  in  our 
own  English  cemeteries,  the  practice  of  mankind  has  been 
one  and  continuous.  Sometimes  the  stone  is  a  rough 
boulder  from  the  fields;  a  representative  of  the  big  block 
which  savages  place  on  the  grave  to  keep  the  corpse  from 
rising:  sometimes  it  is  an  oblong  slab  of  slate  or  marble; 
sometimes,  and  especially  among  the  more  advanced  races. 


II:'  < 


EARLY  TOMBSTONES. 


95 


it  is  a  shapely  cross  or  sculptured  monument.  But  where- 
ever  on  earth  interment  is  practised,  there  stones  of  some 
sort,  solitary  or  in  heaps,  almost  invariably  mark  the  place 
of  burial. 

Again,  as  presents  and  sacrifices  are  offered  at  graves  to 
the  spirits  of  the  dead,  it  is  at  the  stone  which  records  the 
last  resting-place  of  the  deceased  that  they  will  oftenest 
be  presented.  As  a  matter  of  fact  we  know  that,  all  the 
world  over,  offerings  of  wine,  oil,  rice,  ghee,  corn,  and 
meat  are  continually  made  at  the  graves  of  chiefs  or  rela- 
tions. Victims,  both  human  and  otherwise,  are  sacrificed 
at  the  tomb,  and  their  blood  is  constantly  smeared  on  the 
headstone  or  boulder  that  marks  the  spot.  Indeed,  after 
a  time,  the  grave  and  the  stone  get  to  be  confounded  to- 
gether, and  '  he  place  itself  comes  to  have  a  certain  sacred- 
ness,  derived  from  the  ghost  which  haunts  and  inhabits  it. 

Four  well-marked  varieties  of  early  tombstone  are 
recognised  in  the  eastern  continent  at  least,  and  their  dis- 
tribution and  nature  is  thus  described  by  Major  Conder: 

"  Rude  stone  monuments,  bearing  a  strong  family  re- 
semblance in  their  mode  of  construction  and  dimensions, 
have  been  found  distributed  over  all  parts  of  Europe  and 
Western  Asia,  and  occur  also  in  India.  In  some  cases  they 
are  attributable  to  early  Aryan  tribes;  in  others  they  seem 
to  be  of  Semitic  origin.  They  include  menhirs,  or  stand- 
ing stones,  which  were  erected  as  memorials,  and  wor- 
shipped as  deities,  with  libations  of  blood,  milk,  honey,  or 
water  poured  upon  the  stones:  dolmens,  or  stone  tables, 
free  standing — that  is,  not  covered  by  any  mound  or  su- 
perstructure, which  may  be  considered  without  doubt  to 
have  been  used  as  altars  on  which  victims  (often  human) 
were  immolated:  cairns,  also  memorial,  and  sometimes 
surrounding  menhirs  ;  these  were  made  by  the  contribu- 
tions of  numerous  visitors  or  pilgrims,  each  adding  a  stone 
as  witness  of  his  presence  :  finally  cromlechs,  or  stone 
circles,  used  as  sacred  enclosures  or  early  hypaethral  tern- 


96 


SACRED  STONES. 


I  t 


pies,  often  with  a  central  menhir  or  dolmen  as  statue  or 
altar." 

There  can  be  very  little  doubt  that  every  one  of  these 
monuments  is  essentially  sepulchral  in  character.  The 
menhir  or  standing  stone  is  the  ordinary  gravestone  still 
in  use  among  us:  the  dolmen  is  a  chambered  tomb,  once 
covered  by  a  tumulus,  but  now  bare  and  open:  the  cairn 
is  a  heap  of  stones  piled  above  the  dead  body:  the  stone 
circle  is  apparently  a  later  J:emple  built  around  a  tomb, 
whose  position  is  marked  by  the  menhir  or  altar-stone  in 
its  centre.  And  each  has  been  the  parent  of  a  numerous 
offspring.  The  menhir  gives  rise  to  the  obelisk,  the  stone 
cross,  and  the  statue  or  idol;  the  dolmen,  to  the  sarco- 
phagus, the  altar-tomb,  and  the  high  altar;  the  cairn, 
to  the  tope  and  also  to  the  pyramid;  the  cromlech,  or 
stone  circle,  to  the  temple  or  church  in  one  at  least  of  its 
many  developments. 

Each  of  these  classes  of  monuments.  Major  Conder  ob- 
serves, has  its  distinctive  name  in  th :  Semitic  languages, 
and  is  frequently  mentioned  in  the  early  Hebrew  litera- 
ture. The  menhir  is  the  "  pillar  "  of  our  Authorised  Ver- 
sion of  the  Old  Testament;  the  dolmen  is  the  "  altar  ";  the 
cairn  is  the  "heap";  and  the  stone  circle  appears  under 
the  names  Gilgal  and  Hazor.  The  significance  of  these 
facts  will  appear  a  little  later  on  when  I  reach  a  more  ad- 
vanced stage  in  the  evolution  of  stone-worship. 

In  the  simplest  and  most  primitive  stage  of  religion, 
such  as  that  pure  ancestor-cult  still  surviving  unmixed 
among  the  people  of  New  Guinea  or  the  African  tribes 
whose  practice  Mr.  Duff  Macdonald  has  so  admirably  de- 
scribed for  us,  it  is  the  corpse  or  ghost  itself,  not  the  stone 
to  mark  its  dwelling,  which  comes  in  for  all  the  veneration 
and  all  the  gifts  of  the  reverent  survivors.  But  we  must 
remember  that  every  existing  religion,  however  primitive 
in  type,  is  now  very  ancient;  and  it  is  quite  natural  that 
in  many  cases  the  stone  should  thus  come  itself  to  be  re- 
garded as  the  ghost  or  god,  the  object  to  which  veneration 


'f  I 


FOOD  AND  VALUABLES  OFFERED  TO  STONES. 


97 


is  paid  by  the  tribesmen.  In  fact,  just  in  proportion  as  the 
ghost  evolves  into  the  god,  so  does  the  tombstone  begin 
to  evolve  into  the  fetish  or  idol. 

At  first,  however,  it  is  merely  as  the  rude  unshapen 
stone  that  the  idol  in  this  shape  receives  the  worship  of  its 
votaries.  This  is  the  stage  that  has  been  christened  by 
that  very  misleading  name  fetishism,  and  erroneously  sup- 
posed to  lie  at  the  very  basis  of  all  religion.  Here  are  a  few 
interesting  samples  of  this  stage  of  stone-worship,  taken 
from  the  very  careful  Samoan  collection  of  Mr.  Turner,  of 
the  London  Missionary  Society: 

"  Fonge  and  Toafa  were  the  names  of  the  two  oblong 
smooth  stones  which  stood  en  a  raised  platform  of  loose 
stones  inland  of  one  of  the  villages.  They  were  supposed 
to  be  the  parents  of  Saato,  a  god  who  controlled  the  rain. 
When  the  chiefs  and  people  were  ready  to  go  of¥  for  weeks 
to  certain  places  in  the  bush  for  the  sport  of  pigeon-catch- 
ing, offerings  of  cooked  taro  and  fish  were  laid  on  the 
stones,  accompanied  by  prayers  for  fine  weather  and  no 
rain.  Any  one  who  refused  an  offering  to  the  stones  was 
frowned  upon  ;  and  in  the  event  of  rain  was  blamed  and 
punished  for  bringing  down  the  wrath  of  the  fine-weather 
god,  and  spoiling  the  sports  of  the  season." 

Here,  even  if  one  doubts  that  Saato  was  a  deceased 
weather-doctor,  and  that  Fonge  and  Toafa  were  his  father 
and  mother  (which  I  do  not  care  to  insist  upon),  it  is  at 
least  clear  that  we  have  to  deal  essentially  with  two  stand- 
ing stones  of  precisely  the  same  sort  .as  those  which  habitu- 
ally mark  sepulture. 

Of  the  gods  of  Hudson's  Island,  Mr.  Turner  gives  this 
very  interesting  and  suggestive  account: 

"  Foelangi  and  Maumau  were  the  principal  gods.  They 
had  each  a  temple;  and  under  the  altars,  on  which  were 
laid  out  in  rows  the  skulls  of  departed  chiefs  and  people, 
were  suspended  offerings  of  pearl-shell  and  other  valua- 
bles. Foelangi  had  an  unchiselled  block  of  stone  to 
represent  him — something  like  a  six  feet  high  grave- 


L 


s 


^^amfim 


98 


SACRED  STONES. 


:i 


m 


Mil 


nf 


■ .  U!, 


it  ' ■ 


stone.  .  .  .  Offerings  of  food  were  taken  to  the  temples, 
that  the  gods  might  first  partake  before  anyone  else  ate 
anything.  .  .  .  Husked  cocoanuts  were  laid  down,  one 
before  each  skull." 

And  of  St.  Augustine  Island  he  writes:  "  At  the  Temple 
of  Maumau  there  stood  a  nine  feet  high  coral  sandstone 
slab  from  the  beach.  .  .  .  Meat  offerings  were  laid  on  the 
altars,  accompanied  by  songs  and  dances  in  honour  of  the 
god." 

Similarly,  about  one  of  the  Gilbert  Group,  Mr.  Turner 
says: 

"  They  had  other  gods  and  goddesses,  and,  as  was  com- 
mon in  this  group,  had  sandstone  slabs  or  pillars  set  up 
here  and  there  among  the  houses.  Before  these  shrines 
offerings  of  food  were  laid  during  the  day,  which  the 
priests  took  away  stealthily  by  night  and  made  the  credu- 
lous believe  that  gods  and  not  mortals  had  done  it.  If 
the  stone  slab  represented  a  goddess  it  was  not  placed 
erect,  but  laid  down  on  the  ground.  Being  a  lady  they 
thought  it  would  be  cruel  to  make  her  stand  so  long." 

In  these  cases,  and  in  many  others,  it  seems  to  me  cVar 
that  the  original  gravestone  or  menhir  itself  is  the  object 
of  worship,  viewed  as  the  residence  of  the  ghost  or  god  in 
whose  honour  it  was  erected.  For  in  Samoa  we  know 
that  the  grave  "  was  marked  by  a  little  heap  of  stones,  a 
foot  or  two  high,"  and  at  De  Peyster's  Island  "  a  stone 
was  raised  at  the  head  of  the  grave,  and  a  human  head 
carved  on  it " — a  first  step,  as  we  have  already  seen,  to- 
wards the  evolution  of  one  form  of  idol. 

Similar  instances  abound  everywhere.  Among  the 
Khonds  of  India,  every  village  has  its  local  god,  repre- 
sented by  an  upright  stone  under  the  big  tree  on  the 
green,  to  use  frankly  an  English  equivalent.  (The  full  im- 
portance of  this  common  combination  of  sacred  stone  and 
sacred  tree  will  only  come  out  at  a  later  stage  of  our  en- 
quiry.) In  Peru,  worship  was  paid  to  standing  stones 
whiCii,  says  Dr.  Tylor,  "  represented  the  penates  of  house  • 


pi  ;■  p 


DERIVATIVE  SACREDNESS. 


99 


holds  and  the  patron-deities  of  villages  " — in  other  words, 
the  ghosts  of  ancestors  and  of  tribal  chiefs.  "  Near 
Accra,"  says  the  Marquis  de  Nadaillac,  "  the  bodies  were 
placed  under  megalithic  stones,  reminding  us  of  the  dol- 
mens and  cromlechs  of  Europe.  One  vast  plain  is  covered 
with  erect  stones,  some  forming  circles,  some  squares,  and 
often  covered  in  with  large  slabs  which  entirely  closed 
round  the  sepulchral  chamber."  In  Fiji  the  gods  and 
goddesses  "  had  their  abodes  or  shrines  in  black  stones 
like  smooth  round  milestones,  and  there  received  their 
oflferings  of  food."  An  immense  number  of  similar  in- 
stances have  been  collected  by  Dr.  Tylor  and  other  an- 
thropologists. 

But  when  once  the  idea  of  the  sacredness  of  stones  had 
thus  got  firmly  fixed  in  the  savage  mind,  it  was  natural 
enough  that  other  stones,  resembling  those  which  were 
already  recognised  as  gods,  should  come  to  be  regarded 
as  themselves  divine,  or  as  containing  an  indwelling  ghost 
)r  deity.  Of  this  stage,  Mr.  Turner's  Samoa  again  affords 
us  some  curious  instances. 

"  Smooth  stones  apparently  picked  up  out  of  the  bed  of 
the  river  were  regarded  as  representatives  of  certain  gods, 
and  wherever  the  stone  was,  there  the  god  was  supposed 
to  be.  One  resembling  a  fish  would  be  prayed  to  as  the 
fisherman's  god.  Another,  resembling  a  yam,  would  be 
the  yam  god.  A  third,  round  like  a  breadfruit,  the  bread- 
fruit god — and  so  on." 

Now,  the  word  "  apparently  "  used  by  this  very  cautious 
observer  in  this  passage  shows  clearly  that  he  had  never  of 
his  own  knowledge  seen  a  stone  thus  selected  at  random 
worshipped  or  deified,  and  it  is  therefore  possible  that  in 
all  such  cases  the  stone  may  really  have  been  one  of  sepul- 
chral origin.  Still,  I  agree  with  Mr.  Spencer  that  when 
once  the  idea  of  a  ghost  or  god  is  well  developed,  the 
notion  of  such  a  spirit  as  animating  any  remarkable  or 
odd-looking  object  is  a  natural  transition.*     Hence  I  in- 

*  The  whole  subject  is  admirably  worked  out  in  TAe  Principles  of 
Sociology,  §  159* 


'^ 


lOO 


SACRED  STONES. 


I) 


It  ) 


.1     !S 


■I'i' 


I  r, 


'  !   ( 


.1 1 


.  ?  rM 


W'i! 


cline  to  believe  Mr.  Turner  is  right,  and  that  these  stones 
may  really  have  been  picked  out  and  worshipped,  merely 
for  their  oddity,  but  always,  as  he  correctly  infers,  from  the 
belief  in  their  connexion  with  some  god  or  spirit. 

Here  is  another  case,  also  from  Polynesia,  where  no  im- 
mediate connexion  with  any  particular  grave  seems 
definitely  implied: 

"  Two  unchiselled  *  smooth  stones  of  the  stream  *  were 
kept  in  a  temple  at  one  of  the  villages,  and  guarded  with 
great  care.  No  stranger  or  over-curious  person  was  al- 
lowed to  go  near  the  place,  under  penalty  of  a  beating 
from  the  custodians  of  these  gods.  They  represented 
good  and  not  malicious  death-causing  gods.  The  one 
made  the  yams,  breadfruit,  and  cocoanuts,  and  the  other 
sent  fish  to  the  nets. 

"  Another  stone  was  carefully  housed  in  another  village 
as  the  represer*:ative  of  a  rain-making  god.  \7hen  there 
was  overmuch  rain,  the  stone  was  laid  by  the  fire  and  kept 
heated  till  fine  weather  set  in." 

Further  instances  (if  fairly  reported)  occiir  elsewhere. 
**  Among  the  lower  races  of  America,"  says  Dr.  Tylor, 
summarising  Schoolcraft,  "  the  Dakotahs  would  pick  up  a 
round  boulder,  paint  it,  and  then,  addressing  it  as  grand- 
father, make  offerings  to  it,  and  pray  it  to  deliver  them 
from  danger."  But  here  the  very  fact  that  the  stone  is 
worshipped  and  treated  as  an  ancestor  shows  how  deriva- 
tive is  the  deification — how  dependent  upon  the  prior 
association  of  such  stones  with  the  iomb  of  a  forefather 
and  its  indwelling  spirit.  Just  in  the  same  way  we  know 
there  are  countries  where  a  grave  is  more  generally 
marked,  not  by  a  stone,  but  by  a  wooden  stake  ;  and  in 
these  countries,  as  for  instance  among  the  Samoyedes  of 
Siberia,  sticks,  not  stones,  are  the  most  common  objects  of 
reverence.  (Thus,  again,  stick-worship  is  found  "  among 
the  Damaras  of  South  Africa,  whose  ancestors  are  repre- 
sented at  the  sacrificial  feasts  by  stakes  cut  from  trees  or 
bushes  consecrated  to  them,  to  which  stakes  the  meat  is 


U 


THE  SARDINIAN  SACRED  STONES. 


lOI 


first  offered.")  But  here,  too,  we  see  the  clear  affiliation 
upon  ancestor-worship;  and  indeed,  wherever  we  find  the 
common  worship  of  "  stocks  and  stones,"  all  the  analogies 
lead  us  to  believe  the  stocks  and  stones  either  actually 
mark  the  graves  of  ancestors  or  else  are  accepted  as  their 
representatives  and  embodiments. 

The  vast  majority,  however,  of  sacred  stones  with  whose 
history  we  are  well  acquainted  are  indubitably  connected 
with  interments,  ancient  or  modern.  All  the  European 
sacred  stones  are  cromlechs,  dolmens,  trilithons,  or  men- 
hirs, of  which  Mr.  Angus  Smith,  a  most  cautious  authority, 
observes  categorically,  **  We  know  for  a  certainty  that 
memorials  of  burials  are  the  chief  object  of  <^^he  first  one, 
and  of  nearly  all,  the  only  object  apparently."  So  many 
other  examples  will  come  out  incidentally  in  the  course  of 
the  sequel  that  I  will  not  labour  the  point  any  further  at 
present.  Among  the  most  remarkable  instances,  how- 
ever, I  cannot  refrain  from  mentioning  the  great  Sardinian 
sacred  stones,  which  so  often  occur  in  the  neighbourhood 
of  the  miraghi,  or  ancient  forts.  These  consist  of  tall 
conical  monoliths,  rough  and  unhewn  in  the  oldest  ex- 
amples, rudely  hewn  in  the  later  ones,  and  occasionally 
presenting  some  distant  resemblance  to  a  human  face — the 
first  rough  draft  of  the  future  idol.  "  Behind  the  mono- 
lith lies  the  burial-place,  ten  to  fourteen  yards  long  by  one 
or  two  in  width."  These  burial-places  have  been  ex- 
amined by  the  Abbate  Spano. 

"  He  was  satisfied  that  several  bodies  had  been  buried 
together  in  the  same  tomb,  and  that  these  were  therefore 
family  burial-places.  When  the  death  of  one  of  the  mem- 
bers of  the  tribe  occurred,  one  of  the  great  transverse 
stones  which  covered  the  long  alley  built  behind  the  mono- 
lith was  removed,  and  then  replaced  until  the  time  came 
for  another  body  to  claim  its  place  in  the  tomb.  The 
monolith,  called  by  the  Sardinian  peasants  pietra  delV 
altarc,  or  altar-stone,  because  they  believe  it  to  have  been 
used  for  human  sacrifice,  always  faces  the  south  or  east." 


¥ 


102 


SACRED  STONES. 


■  • 


¥. 


|i'' 


11'':! 


i  ! 


i.  / 


I     !{lr. 


Such  a  surviving  tradition  as  to  the  human  sacrifices,  in 
an  island  so  little  sophisticated  as  Sardinia,  has  almost  cer- 
tainly come  down  to  us  unbroken  from  a  very  early  age. 

I  have  already  stated  that  the  idol  is  probably  in  many 
cases  derived  from  the  gravestone  or  other  sacred  stone. 
I  believe  that  in  an  immense  number  of  cases  it  is  simply 
the  original  pillar,  more  or  less  rudely  carved  into  the 
semblance  of  a  human  figure. 

How  this  comes  about  we  can  readily  understand  if  we 
recollect  that  by  a  gradual  transference  of  sentiment  the 
stone  itself  is  at  last  identified  with  the  associated  spirit. 
Here,  once  more,  is  a  transitional  instance  from  our  Poly- 
nesian storehouse. 

The  great  god  of  Bowditch  Island  "  was  supposed  to  be 
embodied  in  a  stone,  which  was  carefully  wrapped  up  with 
fine  mats,  and  never  seen  by  any  one  but  the  king  "  (note 
this  characteristic  touch  of  kingly  priesthood),  "  and  that 
only  once  a  year,  when  the  decayed  mats  were  stripped 
off  and  thrown  away.  In  sickness,  offerings  of  fine  mats 
were  taken  and  rolled  round  the  sacred  stone,  and  thus  it 
got  busked  up  to  a  prodigious  size;  but  as  the  idol  was 
exposed  to  the  weather  out  of  doors,  night  and  day,  the 
mats  soon  rotted.  No  one  dared  to  appropriate  what  had 
been  offered  to  the  god,  and  hence  the  old  mats,  as  they 
were  taken  off,  were  heaped  in  a  place  by  themselves  and 
allowed  to  rot." 

Now  the  reasonableness  of  all  this  is  immediately  ap- 
parent if  we  remember  that  the  stones  which  stand  on 
graves  are  habitually  worshipped,  and  anointed  with  oil, 
milk,  and  blood.  It  is  but  a  slight  further  step  to  regard 
the  stone,  not  only  as  eating  and  drinking,  but  also  as 
needing  warmth  and  clothing.  As  an  admirable  example 
of  the  same  train  of  thought,  working  out  the  same  result 
elsewhere,  compare  this  curious  account  of  a  stone  idol  at 
Inniskea  (a  rocky  islet  off  the  Mayo  coast),  given  by  the 
Earl  of  Roden,  as  late  as  1851,  in  his  Progress  of  the 
Reformation  in  Ireland: 


»'— . 


THE  STONE  AS  IDOL.  103 

"  In  the  south  island,  in  the  house  of  a  man  named 
Monigan,  a  stone  idol,  called  in  the  Irish  *  Neevougi/  has 
been  Iiom  time  immemorial  religiously  preserved  and  wor- 
shipped. This  god  resembles  in  appearance  a  thick  roll 
of  home-spun  flannel,  which  arises  from  the  custom  of 
dedicating  a  dress  of  that  material  to  it  whenever  its  aid 
is  sought;  this  is  sewn  on  by  an  old  woman,  its  priestess, 
whose  peculiar  care  it  is.  Of  the  early  history  of  this  idol 
no  authentic  information  can  be  procured,  but  its  power  is 
believed  to  be  immense;  they  pray  to  it  in  time  of  sick- 
ness; it  is  invoked  when  a  storm  is  desired  to  dash  some 
hapless  ship  upon  their  coast;  and,  again,  the  exercise  of 
its  power  is  solicited  in  calming  the  angry  waves,  to  admit 
of  fishing  or  visiting  the  mainland." 

Nor  is  this  a  solitary  instance  in  modern  Europe.  "  In 
certain  mountain  districts  of  Norway,"  says  Dr.  Tylor, 
*'  up  to  the  end  of  the  last  century,  the  peasants  used  to 
preserve  round  stones,  washed  them  every  Thursday  eve- 
ning, ....  smeared  them  with  butter  before  the  fire, 
laid  them  in  the  seat  of  honour  on  fresh  straw,  and  at  cer- 
tain times  of  the  year  steeped  them  in  ale,  that  they  might 
bring  luck  and  comfort  to  the  house." 

The  first  transitional  step  towards  the  idol  proper  is 
given  in  some  rude  attempt  to  make  the  standing  stone  at 
the  grave  roughly  resemble  a  human  figure.  In  the  later 
Sardinian  examples,  two  conical  lumps,  representing  the 
breasts,  seem  to  mark  that  the  figure  is  intended  to  be 
female — either  because  a  woman  is  buried  there,  or  to 
place  the  spot  under  the  protection  of  a  goddess.  From 
this  rude  beginning  we  get  every  transitional  form,  like 
the  Hermae  and  the  archaic  Apollos,  till  we  arrive  at  the 
perfect  freedom  and  beauty  of  Hellenic  sculpture.  Says 
Grote,  in  speaking  of  Greek  worship,  "their  primitive 
memorial  erected  to  a  god  did  not  even  pretend  to  be  an 
image,  but  was  often  nothing  more  than  a  pillar,  a  board, 
a  shapeless  stone,  or  a  post  [notice  the  resemblance  to  or- 
dinary grave-marks]  receiving  care  and  decoration  from 


104 


SACRED  STONES. 


il  ' 
I 


h; 


';  I 


'-It' 


i:! 


i: 

1; 

, 

( 

1 

!i 

? 

!■! 


the  neighbourhood  as  well  as  worship."  Dr.  Tylor,  to 
whose  great  collection  of  instances  I  owe  many  acknow- 
ledgments, says  in  comment  on  this  passage,  "  Such  were 
the  log  that  stood  for  Artemis  in  Euboea;  the  stake  that 
represented  Pallas  Athene  *  sine  eflfigie  rudis  palus,  et 
informe  lignum  ;'  the  unwrought  stone  {XWos  apyos) 
at  Hyethos,  which  '  after  the  ancient  manner '  represented 
Heracles;  the  thirty  such  stones  which  the  Pharaeans  in 
like  fashion  worshipped  for  the  gods;  and  that  one  which 
received  such  honour  in  Boeotian  festivals  as  representing 
the  Thespian  Eros."  Such  also  was  the  conical  pillar  of 
Asiatic  type  which  stood  instead  of  an  image  of  the 
Paphian  Aphrodite,  and  the  conical  stone  worshipped  in 
Attica  under  the  name  of  Apollo.  A  sacred  boulder  lay 
in  front  of  the  temple  of  the  Troezenians,  while  another 
in  Argos  bore  the  significant  name  of  Zeus  Kappotas. 
"  Among  all  the  Greeks,"  says  Pausanias,  "  rude  stones 
were  worshipped  before  the  images  of  the  gods."  Among 
the  Semites,  in  like  manner,  Melcarth  was  reverenced  at 
Tyre  under  the  form  of  two  stone  pillars. 

Intermediate  forms,  in  which  the  stone  takes  succes- 
sively a  face,  a  head,  arms,  legs,  a  shapely  and  well-moulded 
body,  are  familiar  to  all  of  us  in  existing  remains.  The 
well-known  figures  of  Priapus  form  a  good  transitional  ex- 
ample. "  At  Tabala,  in  Arabia,"  says  Professor  Robert- 
son Smith,  **  a  sort  of  crown  was  sculptured  on  the  stone 
of  al-Lat  to  mark  her  head."  Indeed,  to  the  last,  the 
pillar  or  monolithic  type  is  constantly  suggested  in  the 
erect  attitude  and  the  proportions  of  the  statue  among  all 
except  the  highest  Hellenic  examples.  I  may  add,  that 
even  in  Islam  itself,  which  so  sternly  forbids  images  of  any 
sort,  some  traces  of  such  anthropomorphic  gravestones 
may  still  be  found.  I  noticed  in  the  mosque  of  Mehemet 
Ali  at  Cairo  that  the  headstones  of  the  Vice-regal  family 
were  each  adorned  with  a  fez  and  tassel. 

It  is  worth  noting  that  the  obelisk,  also,  doubtless  owes 
its  origin  to  the  monolith  or  standing  stone.     Whatever 


ill 


I 


■«!^ 


mm 


ORIGIN  OF  THE  OBELISK. 


105 


fresh  sacredness  it  may  later  have  obtained  from  the  asso- 
ciations of  sun-worship,  as  a  solar  ray,  cannot  mask  for 
any  wide  anthropological  enquirer  the  fact  that  it  is  by 
descent  a  mere  shapeless  head-stone,  with  a  new  symbolic 
meaning  given  to  it  (as  so  often  happens)  in  a  new  religion. 
The  two  obelisks  which  stand  so  often  before  Egyptian 
temples  are  clearly  the  analogues  of  the  two  pillars  of 
Melcarth  at  Tyie,  and  the  sacred  pair  at  Paphos,  Hera- 
polis,  and  Solomon's  temple.  In  the  same  way,  the  Indian 
tope  and  the  pyramid  are  descendants  of  the  cairn,  as  the 
great  stone-built  tombs  of  the  Numidian  kings  in  Algeria 
seem  to  be  more  advanced  equivalents  of  the  tumulus  or 
round  barrow.  And  let  me  clear  the  ground  here  for  what 
is  to  follow  by  adding  most  emphatically  that  the  genesis 
of  stone-worship  here  sketched  out  precludes  the  possi- 
bility of  phallic  worship  being  in  any  sense  a  primitive 
form  of  it.  The  standing  stone  may  have  been,  and 
doubtless  often  was,  in  later  stages,  identified  with  a 
phallus  ;  but  if  the  theory  here  advocated  is  true,  the 
lingam,  instead  of  lying  at  the  root  of  the  monolith,  must 
necessarily  be  a  later  and  derivative  form  of  it.  At  the 
same  time,  the  stone  being  regarded  as  the  ancestor  of  the 
family,  it  is  not  unnatural  that  early  men  should  some- 
times carve  it  into  a  phallic  shape.  Having  said  this,  I 
will  say  no  more  on  the  subject,  which  has  really  extremely 
little  to  do  with  the  essentials  of  stone  worship,  save  that 
on  many  gravestones  of  early  date  a  phallus  marked  the 
male  sex  of  the  occupant,  while  breasts,  or  a  symbolical 
triangle,  or  a  mandorla,  marked  the  grave  of  a  woman. 

Sometimes,  both  forms  of  god,  the  most  primitive  and 
the  most  finished,  the  rude  stone  and  the  perfect  statue, 
exist  side  by  side  in  the  same  community. 

"  In  the  legendary  origin  of  Jagannath,"  says  Sir 
William  Hunter,  "  we  find  the  aboriginal  people  worship- 
ping a  blue  stone  in  the  depths  of  the  forest.  But  the 
deity  at  length  wearies  of  primitive  jungle  offerings,  and 
longs  for  the  cooked  food  of  the  more  civilised  Aryans, 


io6 


SACRED  STONES. 


•;»., 


I   • 


I'' ) 


iN' 


upon  whose  arrival  on  the  scene  the  rude  blue  stone 
gives  place  to  a  carved  image.  At  the  present  hour,  in 
every  hamlet  of  Orissa,  this  twofold  worship  coexists. 
The  common  people  have  their  shapeless  stone  oi  block, 
which  they  adore  with  simple  rites  in  the  open  air;  while 
side  by  side  with  it  stands  a  temple  to  one  of  the  Aryan 
gods,  with  its  carved  idol  and  elaborate  rites." 

Where  many  sacred  stones  exist  all  round,  marking  the 
graves  of  the  dead,  or  inhabited  by  their  spirits,  it  is  not 
surprising,  once  more,  that  a  general  feeling  of  reverence 
towards  all  stones  should  begin  to  arise — that  the  stone 
per  se,  especially  if  large,  odd,  or  conspicuous,  should  be 
credited  to  some  extent  with  indwelling  divinity.  Nor  is 
it  astonishing  that  the  idea  of  men  being  descended  from 
stones  should  be  rife  among  people  who  must  often,  when 
young,  have  been  shown  headstones,  monoliths,  boulders, 
or  cromlechs,  and  been  told  that  the  offerings  made  upon 
them  were  gifts  to  their  ancestors.  They  would  accept 
the  idea  as  readily  as  our  own  children  accept  the  Hebrew 
myth  of  the  creation  of  Adam,  our  prime  ancestor,  from 
"  the  dust  of  the  ground  " — a  far  less  promising  material 
than  a  block  of  marble  or  sandstone.  In  this  way,  it 
seems  to  me,  we  can  most  readily  understand  the  nume- 
rous stories  of  men  becoming  stones,  and  stones  becoming 
men,  which  are  rife  among  the  myths  of  savage  or  barba- 
rous peoples. 

Fernandez  de  Piedrahita  says  that  the  Laches  "  wor- 
shipped every  stone  as  a  god,  as  they  said  they  had  all 
been  men."  Arriaga  tells  us  the  Peruvians  paid  honour 
to  "  very  large  stones,  saying  that  they  were  once  men." 
In  the  American  Report  of  the  Bureau  of  Ethnology  for 
1880,  several  stories  are  told  of  metamorphosis  of  men  into 
stones  from  the  Iroquois  legends.  According  to  Dorman, 
the  Oneidas  and  Dakotahs  claim  descent  from  stones,  to 
which  they  ascribe  animation.  An  interesting  intermedi- 
ate form,  which  shows  the  growth  of  this  idea,  is  given  in 
Arriaga's  statement  that  the  Marcayoc,  or  idol  worshipped 


METAMORPiaOSlS  OF  MEN  INTO  STONES. 


107 


in  Peru  as  the  patron  of  the  village,  "  is  sometimes  a  sione 
and  sometimes  a  mummy  " :  in  other  words ,  it  depended 
upon  circumstances  whether  they  reverenced  the  body 
itself  or  the  gravestone  that  covered  it.  Among  the 
Coast  Negroes,  when  a  person  dies,  a  stone  is  taken  to  a 
certain  house — the  village  valhalla — to  represent  his 
ghost;  and  among  the  Bulloms,  women  "  make  occasional 
sacrifices  and  offerings  of  rice  to  the  stones  which  are 
preserved  in  memory  of  the  dead."  At  Tanna,  in  the  New 
Hebrides,  Mr.  Gray,  a  missionary,  found  "  a  piece  of 
sacred  ground,  on  which  were  deposited  the  stones  in 
which  they  supposed  the  spirits  of  their  departed  relatives 
to  reside " ;  and  Commander  Henderson,  commenting 
upon  a  similar  case  from  Vati  Island,  says  these  "  were  the 
only  form  of  gods  the  natives  possessed,  and  into  them 
they  supposed  the  souls  of  their  departed  friends  and 
relatives  to  enter."  Some  of  them  "  had  a  small  piece 
chipped  out  on  one  side,  by  means  of  which  the  indwelling 
ghost  or  spirit  was  supposed  to  have  ingress  or  egress." 
Of  a  third  sort,  rudely  fashioned  by  hand.  Captain  Hender- 
son says  acutely,  "  these,  it  seemed  to. me,  were  the  begin- 
nings of  a  graven  image — a  common  stone,  sacred  as  the 
dwelling-place  of  an  ancestral  ghost."  * 

Classical  and  Hebrew  literature  are  full  of  examples  of 
such  stones,  believed  to  have  been  once  human.  Niobe 
and  Lot's  wife  are  instances  that  will  at  once  occur  to 
every  reader.  In  Boeotia,  Pausanias  tells  us,  people  be- 
lieved Alkmene,  the  mother  of  Herakles,  was  changed 
into  a  stone.  Perseus  and  the  Gorgon's  head  is  another 
example,  paralleled  by  the  Breton  idea  that  their  great 
stone  circles  were  people,  who,  in  the  modern  Christian- 
ised version  of  the  story,  were  turned  into  stone  for  danc- 
ing on  a  Sunday.  (About  this  Christianisation  I  shall 
have  a  word  to  say  further  on;  meanwhile,  observe  the 
similar  name  of  the  Giant's  Dance  given  to  the  great 

*  I  owe  this  and  several  other  references  to  Mr.  Spencer's  Appendix, 
as  I  do  some  of  my  previously  cited  cases  to  Mr.  Lang  or  Dr.  Tylor. 


\ 


¥ 


io8 


SACRED  STONES. 


l!     !     ,51 


I!'    i 


Et    , 


I    i 
I    i 


i;  X, 


Stonehenge  of  Ireland.)  In  the  same  way  there  is  a 
Standing  Rock  on  the  upper  Missouri  which  parallels  the 
story  of  Niobe — it  was  once  a  woman,  who  became  petri- 
fied with  grief  when  her  husband  took  a  second  wife. 
Some  Samoan  gods  (or  ancestral  ghosts)  "  were  changed 
into  stones,"  says  Mr.  Turner,  "  and  now  stand  up  in  a 
rocky  part  of  the  lagoon  on  the  north  side  of  Upolu." 

On  the  other  hand,  if  men  become  stones,  stones  alsc 
become  men,  or  at  least  give  birth  to  men.  We  get  a  good 
instance  of  this  in  the  legend  of  Deucalion.  Again,  by  the 
roadside,  near  the  city  of  the  Panopoeans,  lay  the  stones 
out  of  which  Prometheus  made  men.  Manke,  the  first 
man  in  Mitchell  Island,  came  out  of  a  stone.  The  in- 
habitants of  the  New  Hebrides  say  that  "  the  human  race 
sprang  from  stones  and  the  earth."  On  Francis  Island, 
says  Mr.  Turner,  "  close  by  the  temple  there  was  a  seven- 
feet-long  beach  sandstone  slab  erected,  before  which  offer- 
ings were  laid  as  the  people  united  for  prayer  " ;  and  the 
natives  here  told  him  that  one  of  their  gods  had  made 
stones  become  men.  '*  In  Melanesia,"  says  Mr.  Lang, 
"  matters  are  so  mixed  that  it  is  not  easy  to  decide 
whether  a  worshipful  stone  is  the  dwelling  of  a  dead  man's 
soul,  or  is  of  spiritual  merit  in  itself,  or  whether  the  stone 
is  the  spirit's  outward  part  or  organ."  And,  indeed,  a  sort 
of  general  confusion  between  the  stone,  the  ghost,  the 
ancestor,  and  the  god,  at  last  pervades  the  mind  of  the 
stone-worshipper  everywhere.  "  The  curious  anthro- 
pomorphic idea  of  stones  being  husbands  and  wives,  and 
even  having  children,"  as  Dr.  Tylor  calls  it — an  idea 
familiar  to  the  Fijians  as  to  the  Peruvians  and  Lapps — is 
surely  explicable  at  once  by  the  existence  of  headstones 
either  to  men  or  women,  and  the  confusion  between  the 
mark  and  the  ghost  it  commemorates. 

An  interesting  side-point  in  this  gradual  mixing  up  of 
the  ghost  and  the  stone,  the  god  and  the  image,  is  sh_,wn 
in  a  gradual  change  of  detail  as  to  the  mode  of  making 
oflferings  at  the  tomb  or  shrine.     On  the  great  trilithon  in 


BLOOD  OFFERED   TO  STONES.  iqq 

Tonga,  Miss  Gordon-Cumming  tells  us,  a  bowl  of  kava 
was  placed  on  a  horizontal  stone.     Here  it  must  have  been 
supposed  that  the  ghost  itself  issued  forth  (perhaps  by 
night)  to  drink  it,  as  the  serpent  which  represented  the 
spirit  of  Anchises  glided  from  the  tomb  to  lick  up  the 
offerings  presented  by  ^neas.     Gradually,  however,  as 
the  stone  and  the  ghost  get  more  closely  connected  in  idea 
the  offering  is  made  to  the  monument  itself;  though  in 
the  earlier  stages  the  convenience  of  using  the  flat  altar- 
stone  (wherever  such  exists)  as  a  place  of  sacrifice  for  vic- 
tims probably  masks  the  transition  even  to  the  worship- 
pers  themselves.      Dr.    Wise   saw   in   the   Himalayas   a 
group  of  stones  "erected  to  the  memory  of  the  petty 
Rajahs  of  Kolam,"  where  "  some  fifty  or  sixty  unfortunate 
women  sacrificed  themselves."     The  blood,  in  particular, 
is  offered  up  to  the  ghost;  and  "the  cup-hollows  which 
have  been  found  in  menhirs  and  dolmens,"  says  Captain 
Conder,  "  are  the  indications  of  the  Hbations,  often  of  hu- 
man blood,  once  poured  on  these  stones  by  heathen  wor- 
shippers."^  "  Cups  are  often  found,"  says  a  good  Scotch 
observer,  "on  stones  connected  with  the  monuments  of 
the  dead,  such  as  on  the  covering  stones  of  kistvaens,  par- 
ticularly those  of  the  short  or  rarest  form  ;    on  the  flat 
stones  of  cromlechs;  and  on  stones  of  chambered  graves." 
On  the  top  of  the  cairn  at  Glen  Urquhart,  on  Loch  Ness, 
is  an  oblong  mass  of  slate-stone,  obviously  sepulchral,  and 
marked  with  very  numerous  cups.     When  the  stones  are 
upright  the  notion  of  offering  the  blood  to  the  upper  part, 
which  represents  the  face  or  mouth,  becomes  very  natural, 
and  forms  a  distinct  step  in  the  process  of  anthropomor- 
phisation  of  the  headstone  into  the  idol. 

We  get  two  stages  of  this  evolution  side  by  side  in  the 
two  deities  of  the  Samoyed  travelhng  ark-sledge,  "one 
with  a  sf.one  head,  the  other  a  mere  black  stone,  both 
dressed  in  green  robes  with  red  lappets,  and  both  smeared 
with  sacrificial  blood."  In  the  Indian  groups  of  standing 
stones,  representing  the  Five  Pandavas,  "it  is  a  usual 


!   I 


!  I 


!■), 


IIO 


SACRED  STONES, 


practice,"  says  Dr.  Tylor,  "  to  daub  each  stone  with  red 
paint,  forming,  as  it  were,  a  great  blood-spot  where  the 
face  would  be  if  it  were  a  shaped  idol."  Mr.  Spencer,  I 
think,  hits  the  key-note  of  this  practice  in  an  instructive 
passage.  "  A  Dakotah,"  he  says,  "  before  praying  to  a 
stone  for  succour  paints  it  with  some  red  pigment,  such  as 
red  ochre.  Now,  when  we  read  that  along  with  offerings 
of  milk,  honey,  fruit,  flour,  etc.,  the  Bodo  and  Dhimals 
offer  *  red  lead  or  cochineal,'  we  may  suspect  that  these 
three  colouring  matters,  having  red  as  their  common  cha- 
racter, are  substitutes  for  blood.  The  supposed  resident 
ghost  was  at  first  propitiated  by  anointing  the  stone  with 
human  blood;  and  then,  in  default  of  this,  red  pigment 
was  used,  ghosts  and  gods  being  supposed  by  primitive 
men  to  be  easily  deceived  by  shams."  It  is  possible,  too, 
that  with  the  process  of  idealisation  and  spiritualisation  it 
might  be  supposed  a  substitute  would  please  the  gods 
equally  well,  or  that  redness  generally  was  the  equivalent 
of  blood,  in  the  same  way  as  the  Chinese  burn  paper 
money  and  utensils  to  set  free  their  ghosts  for  the  use  of 
ancestral  spirits. 

In  any  case,  it  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  faces  of 
many  Hindu  gods  are  habitually  painted  red.  And  that 
this  is  the  survival  of  the  same  ancient  custom  we  see  in 
the  case  of  Shashti,  protectress  of  children,  whose  proper 
representative  is  "  a  rough  stone  as  big  as  a  man's  head, 
smeared  with  red  paint,  and  set  at  the  foot  of  the  sacred 
vata-tree."  Like  customs  survived  in  Greece  down  to  the 
classical  period.  "  The  faces  of  the  ancient  gilded  Dionysi 
at  Corinth,"  says  Mr.  Lang,  quoting  Pausanias,  "  were 
smudged  all  over  with  cinnabar,  like  fetish-«tones  in  India 
or  Africa."  In  early  South  Italy,  too,  the  Priapus-Hermes, 
who  protected  the  fields,  had  his  face  similarly  "  daubed 
with  minium."  Is  it  possible  to  dissever  these  facts  from 
the  cannibal  banquets  of  the  Aztec  gods,  where  the  images 
had  lumps  of  palpitating  human  flesh  thrust  into  their 


MIGRATION  OF  SACRED  STONES. 


Ill 


lips,  and  where  their  faces  were  smeared  with  the  warm 
blood  of  the  helpless  victims  ? 

Only  in  one  instance,  however,  have  I  been  able  to  trace 
the  custom  of  painting  with  red  directly  back  to  cannibal- 
ism, and  that  is  among  the  man-eaters  of  the  New 
Hebrides,  where,  when  a  man  died,  and  his  body  was  laid 
out  in  a  piece  of  thick  native  cloth,  "  the  face  was  kept 
exposed  and  painted  red."  I  believe  with  this  practice 
must  ultimately  be  correlated  the  red-painted  faces  of  the 
Corinthian  Dionysi. 

Another  point  of  considerable  interest  and  importance  in 
the  evolution  of  stone  worship  is  connected  with  the  migra- 
tion of  sacred  stones.  When  the  Israelites  left  Egypt,  ac- 
cording to  the  narrative  in  Exodus,  they  carried  the  bones 
of  Joseph  with  them.  When  Rachel  left  her  father's  tent 
she  stole  the  family  teraphim  to  accompany  her  on  her 
wanderings.  When  .Eneas  flew  from  burning  Troy,  he 
bore  away  to  his  ships  his  country's  gods,  his  Lares  and 
Penates.  All  of  these  tales,  no  doubt,  are  equally  unhis- 
torical,  but  they  represent  what,  to  the  people  who  framed 
the  legends,  seemed  perfectly  natural  and  probable  con- 
duct. Just  in  the  same  way,  when  stone-worshippers 
migrate  from  one  country  to  another,  they  are  likely  to 
carry  with  them  their  sacred  stones,  or  at  least  the  most 
portable  or  holiest  of  the  number. 

Here  is  a  very  good  illustrative  case,  once  more  from 
that  most  valuable  storehouse.  Turner's  Samoa.  The 
Fijian  gods  and  goddesses  we  saw,  according  to  Tylor, 
"  had  their  abodes  or  shrines  in  black  stones  like  smooth 
round  millstones,  and  there  received  their  offerings  of 
food."  But  on  a  certain  Samoan  island,  says  Mr.  Turner, 
"  In  a  district  said  to  have  been  early  populated  by 
settlers  from  Fiji,  a  number  of  fancy  Fijian  stones  were 
kept  in  a  temple,  and  worshipped  in  time  of  war.  The 
priest,  in  consulting  them,  built  them  up  in  the  form  of  a 
wall,  and  then  watched  to  see  how  they  fell.  If  they  fell 
to  the  westward,  it  was  a  sign  that  the  enemy  there  was  to 


I 


112 


SACRED  STONES. 


V 


I 


|i  ! 


'  1 

;i 

,  1    i 

be  driven;  but  if  they  fell  to  eastward,  that  was  a  warning 
of  defeat,  and  delay  in  making  an  attack  was  ordered 
accordingly." 

I  canot  find  room  here  for  many  detailed  instances  of 
similar  migrations;  but  there  are  two  examples  in  Britain 
so  exceedingly  interesting  that  even  in  so  hasty  a  notice  I 
cannot  pass  them  by  without  a  brief  mention.  The  inner 
or  smaller  stones  at  Stonehenge  are  known  to  be  of  remote 
origin,  belonging  to  rocks  not  found  nearer  Salisbury 
Plain  than  Cumberland  in  one  direction  or  Belgium  in  the 
other.  They  are  surrounded  by  a  group  of  much  larger 
stones,  arranged  as  trilithons,  but  carved  out  of  the  com- 
mon sarsen  blocks  distributed  over  the  neighbouring 
country.  I  have  tried  to  show  elsewhere  that  these 
smaller  igneous  rocks,  untouched  by  the  tool,*  were  the 
ancient  sacred  stones  of  an  immigrant  tribe  that  came  into 
Britain  from  the  Continent,  probably  over  a  broad  land- 
belt  which  then  existed  where  the  Straits  of  Dover  now 
flow;  and  that  the  strangers  on  their  arrival  in  Britain 
erected  these  their  ancestral  gods  on  the  Plain  of  Ames- 
bury,  and  further  contributed  to  their  importance  and 
appearance  by  surrounding  them  with  a  circle  of  the 
biggest  and  most  imposing  grey-wethers  that  the  new 
country  in  which  they  had  settled  could  easily  afford. 

The  other  case  is  that  of  the  Scone  stone.  This  sacred 
block,  according  to  the  accredited  legend,  was  originally 
the  ancestral  god  of  the  Irish  Scots,  on  whose  royal 
tumulus  at  Tara  it  once  stood.  It  was  carried  by  them  to 
Argyllshire  on  their  first  invasion,  and  placed  in  a  cranny 
of  the  wall  (say  modern  versions)  at  DunstafTnage  Castle. 
When  the  Scotch  kings  removed  to  Scone,  Kenneth  II. 
took  the  stone  to  his  new  lowland  residence.      Thence 

*So  Moses  in  the  legend  commanded  the  children  of  Israel  to  build 
"  an  altar  of  whole  stones,  over  which  no  man  hath  lift  up  any  iron  "  ; 
and  so  of  the  boulders  composing  the  altar  on  Mount  Ebal  it  was  said, 
"Thou  shah  not  lift  up  any  iron  tool  upon  them."  The  conservatism 
of  religion  kept  up  the  archaic  fashion  for  sacred  purposes. 


SACRED  STONES  W  BRITAIN. 


"3 


Edward  I.  carried  it  ofif  to  England,  where  it  has  ever  since 
remained  in  Westminster  Abbey,  as  part  of  the  chair  in 
which  the  sovereigns  of  Britain  sit  at  their  coronation. 
Ihe  immense  significance  of  these  facts  or  tales  will  be 
seen  more  clearly  when  we  come  to  consider  the  analogies 
of  the  Hebrew  ark.     Meanwhile,  it  may  help  to  explain 
the  coronation  usage,  and  the  legend  that  wherever  the 
Stone  of  Destiny  is  found  "  the  Scots  in  place  must  reign," 
if  I  add  a  couple  of  analogous  cases  from  the  history  of  the 
same  mixed  Celtic  race.     According  to  Dr.  O'Donovan 
the  inauguration  stone  of  the   O'Donnells  stood  on   a 
tumulus  in  the  midst  of  a  large  plain;  and  on  this  sacred 
stone,  called  the  Flagstone  of  the  Kings,  the  elected  chief 
stood  to  receive  the  white  wand  or  sceptre  of  kingship. 
A  cylindrical  obelisk,  used  for  the  same  purpose,  stands 
to  this  day,  according  to  Dr.  Petrie,  in  the  Rath-na-Riogh 
So,  too,  M'Donald  was  crowned  King  of  the  Isles,  stand- 
ing on  a  sacred  stone,  with  an  impression  on  top  to  receive 
his  feet.     He  based  himself,  as  it  were,  upon  the  gods  his 
ancestors.     The  Tara  stone  even  cried  aloud,  Professor 
Rhys  tells  us,  when  the  true  king  placed  his  feet  above  it 
The    coronation    stone    exists    in    other   countries  ;    for 
example,  in   Hebrew  history,  or  half-history,   we  learn 
that  when  Abimelech  was  made  king  it  was  "by  the 
plain  of  the  pillar  that  was  in  Shechem";    and  when 
Jehoash  was  anointed  by  Jehoiada,  "  the  king  stood  bv  a 
pillar,  as  the  manner  was."     In  front  of  the  church'  of 
Sant'  Ambrogio  at  Milan  stands  the  stone  pillar  at  which 
the    Lombard    kings   and    German    emperors    took    the 
coronation  oath,  under  the  ancient  lime-trees  which  over- 
shadow the  piazza. 

Now,  it  is  quite  true  that  Mr.  Skene,  the  best  authority 
on  Celtic  Scotland,  rejects  this  story  of  the  Stone  of 
Destiny  in  most  parts  as  legendary:  he  believes  the  Scone 
stone  to  have  been  merely  the  sacred  coronation-block  of 
the  Pictish  Kings  at  Scone,  and  never  to  have  come  from 
Ireland  at  all.     Professor  Ramsay  thinks  it  is  a  piece  of 


114 


SACRED  STONES. 


If 


^f 


1^  ' 


red  sandstone  broken  off  the  rock  of  that  district  of  Scot- 
land. Even  Professor  Rhys  (who  gives  a  most  interesting" 
account  of  the  Tara  Stone)  seems  to  have  doubts  as  to  the 
migration.  But,  true  or  not,  the  story  will  amply  serve 
my  purpose  here;  for  I  use  it  only  to  illustrate  the  equally 
dubious  wanderings  of  a  Hebrew  sacred  stone,  at  which 
we  will  arrive  in  due  time;  and  one  legend  is  surely  always 
the  best  possible  parallel  of  another. 

In  the  course  of  ages,  as  religions  develop,  and  espe- 
cially as  a  few  great  gods  grow  to  overshadow  the  minor 
ancestral  Lares  and  spirits,  it  often  comes  about  that 
sacred  stones  of  the  older  faith  have  a  new  religious  sig- 
nificance given  them  in  the  later  system.  Thus  we  have 
seen  the  Argives  worshipped  their  old  sacred  stone  under 
the  name  of  Zeus  Kappotas  ;  the  Thespians  identified 
theirs  with  the  later  Hellenic  Eros;  and  the  Megarians 
considered  a  third  as  the  representative  of  Phoebus.  The 
original  local  sacred  stone  of  Delos  has  been  found  on  the 
spot  where  it  originally  stood,  beneath  the  feet  of  the 
statue  of  the  Delian  Apollo.  And  this,  I  am  glad  to  see, 
is  Mr.  Andrew  Lang's  view  also;  for  he  remarks  of  the 
Greek  un wrought  stones,  "  They  were  blocks  which  bore 
the  names  of  gods,  Hera,  or  Apollo,  names  perhaps  given, 
as  De  Brosses  says,  to  the  old  fetishistic  objects  of  wor- 
ship, after  the  anthropomorphic  gods  entered  [I  should 
say,  were  developed  in]  Hellas."  So,  too,  in  India,  the 
local  sacred  stones  have  been  identified  with  the  deities  of 
the  Hindu  pantheon;  Mr.  Hislop  remarks  that  in  every 
part  of  the  Deccan  (where  Hinduism  is  of  comparatively 
late  introduction)  four  or  five  stones  may  often  be  seen 
in  the  ryot's  field,  placed  in  a  row  and  daubed  with  red 
paint,  which  the  peasants  call  the  Five  Pandavas  ;  but, 
says  Dr.  Tylor,  "  he  reasonably  takes  these  Hindu  names 
to  have  superseded  more  ancient  appellations."  Islam,  in 
like  manner,  has  adopted  the  Kaaba,  the  great  black  stone 
of  the  Holy  Place  at  Mecca;  and  the  Egyptian  religion 


11  i^ 


CHRISTIANISATION  OF  MEGAUTTRIC  MONUMENTS.     115 

gave  a  new  meaning  to  the  pillar  or  monolith,  by  shaping^ 
it  as  an  obelisk  to  represent  a  ray  of  the  rising  sun-god. 

Sometimes  the  sanctity  of  the  antique  stones  was  se- 
cured in  the  later  faith  by  connecting  them  with  some 
legend  or  episode  of  the  orthodox  religion.  Thus  the 
ancient  sacred  stone  kept  at  Delphi — no  doubt  the  original 
oracle  of  that  great  shrine,  as  the  rude  Delian  block  was 
the  precursor  of  the  Delian  Apollo — ^was  explained  with 
reference  to  the  later  Hellenic  belief  by  the  myth  that  it 
was  the  stone  which  Kronos  swallowed  in  mistake  for 
Zeus:  an  explanation  doubtless  due  to  the  fact  that  this 
boulder  was  kept,  like  Monigan's  Irish  idol  and  the 
Samoan  god,  wrapped  up  in  flannel  ;  and  in  the  myth, 
Rhea  deceived  Kronos  by  ofifering  him,  instead  of  Zeus, 
a  stone  wrapped  in  swaddling-bands.  There  is  here  in- 
deed food  for  much  reflection.  The  sacred  stone  of  the 
Trc3ezenians,  in  like  manner,  lay  in  front  of  the  temple;  but 
it  was  Hellenised,  so  to  speak,  by  the  story  that  on  it  the 
Troezenian  elders  sat  when  they  purified  Orestes  from  the 
murder  of  his  mother. 

In  modern  Europe,  as  everybody  knows,  a  similar  Chris- 
tianisation  of  holy  wells,  holy  stones,  and  holy  places  has 
been  managed  by  connecting  them  with  legends  of  saints, 
or  by  the  still  simpler  device  of  marking  a  cross  upon  them. 
The  cross  has  a  threefold  value:  in  the  first  place,  it  drives 
away  from  their  accustomed  haunts  the  ancient  gods  or 
spirits,  always  envisaged  in  early  (  hristian  and  mediaeval 
thought  as  devils  or  demons ;  in  the  second  place,  it  asserts 
the  supremacy  of  the  new  faith ;  and  in  the  third  place,  by 
conferring  a  fresh  sanctity  upon  the  old  holy  place  or  ob- 
ject, it  induces  the  people  to  worship  the  cross  by  the  mere 
habit  of  resorting  to  the  shrine  at  which  their  ancestors  so 
long  worshipped.  Gregory's  well-known  advice  to  St. 
Augustine  on  this  matter  is  but  a  single  example  of  what 
went  on  over  all  Christendom.  In  many  cases,  crosses  in 
Britain  are  still  found  firmly  fixed  in  old  sacred  stones, 
usually  recognisable  by  their  unwrought  condition.    The 


ii6 


SACRED  STONES. 


I'l     ' 


I'  1 


,  I'  li 


■>]■ 


M 


! 


finest  example  in  Europe  is  probably  the  gigantic  mono- 
lith of  Plumen  in  Brittany,  topped  by  an  insignificant  little 
cross,  and  still  resorted  to  by  the  peasants  (especially  the 
childless)  as  a  great  place  of  worship.  The  prehistoric 
monuments  of  Narvia  in  the  Isle  of  Man  have  been  Chris- 
tianised by  having  crosses  deeply  incised  upon  them. 
Other  cases,  like  the  Black  Stones  of  lona,  which  gave 
sanctity  to  that  Holy  Isle  long  before  the  time  of  Columba, 
will  doubtless  occur  at  once  to  every  reader.  With  many 
of  the  Scotch  sculptured  stones,  it  is  difficult  to  decide 
whether  they  v^ere  originally  erected  as  crosses,  or  are 
prehistoric  monuments  externally  Christianised. 

I  have  thus  endeavoured  briefly  to  suggest  the  ultimate 
derivation  of  all  sacred  stones  from  sepulchral  monuments, 
and  to  point  out  the  very  large  part  which  they  bear  in  the 
essential  of  religion — that  is  to  say,  worship — everywhere. 
There  is,  however,  one  particular  application  to  which  I 
wish  to  call  special  attention,  because  of  its  peculiar  inter- 
est as  regards  the  origin  of  the  monotheistic  god  of 
Judaism  and  Christianity.  Hitherto  in  this  chapter,  I  have 
intentionally  made  but  very  few  allusions  to  the  faith  and 
the  sacred  stones  of  the  Hebrews,  because  I  wished  first  to 
give  a  general  view  of  the  whole  ramifications  and  modifi- 
cations of  stone-worship  before  coming  down  to  the  par- 
ticular instance  in  which  we  modern  Europeans  are  most 
deeply  interested.  I  will  now,  however,  give  a  brief  sum- 
mary of  what  seems  to  me  most  suggestive  and  important 
in  the  early  Semitic  stone-cult.  These  results  are  no  doubt 
already  familiar  in  outline  to  most  cultivated  readers,  but 
it  is  possible  they  may  appear  in  a  somewhat  new  light 
when  regarded  in  connexion  with  the  general  history  of 
stone-worship  as  here  elucidatd. 

That  the  Semites,  as  well  as  other  early  nations,  were 
stone-worshippers  we  know  from  a  great  number  of  posi- 
tive instances.  The  stone  pillars  of  Baal  and  the  wooden 
Ashera  cones  were  the  chief  objects  of  adoration  in  the 
Phoenician  religion.     The  Stone  of  Bethel  was  apparently 


SACRED  STONES  OF  THE  HEBREWS. 


117 


a  menhir:  the  cairn  of  Mizpeh  was  doubtless  a  sepulchral 
monument.  The  Israelites  under  Joshua,  we  are  told, 
built  a  Gilgal  of  twelve  standing  stones  ;  and  other  in- 
stances in  the  early  traditions  of  the  Hebrews  will  be 
noticed  in  their  proper  place  later  on.  Similarly,  among 
the  Arabs  of  the  time  of  Mohammed,  two  of  the  chief 
deities  were  Manah  and  Lat,  the  one  a  rock,  the  other  a 
sacred  stone  or  stone  idol:  and  the  Kaaba  itself,  the  great 
black  stone  of  local  worship,  even  the  Prophet  was  com- 
pelled to  recognise  and  Islamise  by  adopting  it  bodily  into 
his  monotheistic  religion. 

The  stone  worship  of  the  Semites  at  large,  though  com- 
paratively neglected  by  Professor  Robertson  Smith,  must 
have  played  a  large  part  in  the  religion  of  that  race,  from 
which  the  Hebrews  were  a  special  offshoot.  "  In  Arabia," 
says  Professor  Smith,  "  where  sacrifice  by  fire  was  almost 
unknown,  we  find  no  proper  altar,  but  in  its  place  a  rude 
pillar  or  heap  of  stones,  beside  which  the  victim  is  slain, 
the  blood  being  poured  out  over  the  stone  or  at  its  base." 
To  the  great  orientalist,  it  is  true,  the  sacred  stone  or  altar, 
like  the  sacred  tree  and  the  sacred  fountain,  are  nothing 
more  than  "common  symbols  at  sanctuaries";  he  thinks 
of  them  not  as  gods  but  merely  as  representatives  of  the 
god,  arbitrarily  chosen.  After  the  evidence  I  have  already 
adduced,  however,  I  think  it  will  be  seen  that  this  position 
is  altogether  untenable;  indeed,  Dr.  Smith  himself  uses 
many  phrases  in  this  connexion  which  enables  us  to  see 
the  true  state  of  the  case  far  more  clearly  than  he  himself 
did.  "  The  sacred  stones  [of  the  Arabs] ,  which  are  al- 
ready mentioned  by  Herodotus,  are  called  ansab,  i.e., 
stones  set  up,  pillars.  We  also  find  the  name  ghariy, 
'blood-bedaubed,'  with  reference  to  the  ritual  just  de- 
scribed [of  sacrifice  at  the  nosb  or  sacred  pillar].  The 
meaning  of  this  ritual  will  occupy  us  later:  meantime  the 
thing  to  be  noted  is  that  the  altar  is  only  a  modification 
of  the  nosb,  and  that  the  rude  Arabian  usage  is  the  primi- 
tive type  out  of  which  all  the  elaborate  altar  ceremonies  of 


ii8 


SACRED  STONES. 


J  I! 


I    tv. 


ll' 


a-i 


■  '  H 


the  more  cultivated  Semites  grew.  Whatever  else  was 
clone  in  connexion  with  a  sacrifice,  the  primitive  rite  of 
sprinkling  or  clashing  the  blood  against  the  altar,  or  allow- 
ing it  to  flow  down  on  the  ground  at  its  base,  was  hardly 
ever  omitted;  and  this  practice  was  not  peculiar  to  the 
Semites,  but  was  equally  the  rule  with  the  Greeks  and  Ro- 
mans, and  indeed  with  the  ancient  nations  generally." 

"  It  is  certain,"  says  Professor  Smith  again,  "  that  the 
original  altar  among  the  Northern  Semites,  as  well  as 
among  the  Arabs,  was  a  great  stone  or  cairn,  at  which  the 
blood  of  the  victim  was  shed."  There  is  no  difference,  he 
declares,  between  the  Hebrew  altar  and  the  Arabian  stand- 
ing stone.  "  Monolithic  pillars  or  cairns  of  stone  are  fre- 
quently mentioned  in  the  more  ancient  parts  of  the  Old 
Testament  as  standing  at  Sanctuaries,  generally  in  connex- 
ion with  a  sacred  legend  about  the  occasion  on  which 
they  were  set  up  by  some  famous  patriarch  or  hero.  In 
the  biblical  story,  they  usually  appear  as  mere  memorial 
structures  without  any  definite  ritual  significance;  but  the 
pentateuchal  law  looks  on  the  use  of  sacred  pillars  as 
idolatrous.  This  is  the  best  evidence  that  such  pillars  held 
an  important  place  among  the  appurtenances  of  Canaanite 
temples  ;  and  as  Hosea  speaks  of  the  pillar  as  an  indis- 
pensable feature  in  the  sanctuaries  of  Northern  Israel  in  his 
time,  we  may  be  sure  that  by  the  mass  of  the  Hebrews  the 
pillars  of  Shechem,  Bethel,  Gilgal,  and  other  shrines  were 
looked  upon,  not  as  mere  memorials  of  historical  events, 
but  as  necessary  parts  of  the  ritual  apparatus  of  a  place  of 
worship.  .  .  .  From  these  evidences,  and  especially  from 
the  fact  that  libations  of  the  same  kind  are  applied  to 
both,  it  seems  clear  that  the  altar  is  a  differentiated  form  of 
the  primitive  rude  stone  pillar.  But  the  sacred  stone  is 
more  than  an  altar,  for  in  Hebrew  and  Canaanite  sanctu- 
aries the  altar,  in  its  developed  form  as  a  table  or  hearth, 
does  not  supersede  the  pillar;  the  two  are  found  side  by 
side  at  the  same  sanctuary,  the  altar  as  a  piece  of  sacrificial 
apparatus,  and  the  pillar  as  a  visible  symbol  or  embodiment 


w' 


SACRED  STONES  OF  THE  HEBREWS. 


119 


of  the  presence  of  the  deity,  which  in  process  of  time 
comes  to  be  fashioned  and  carved  in  various  ways,  till  ulti- 
mately it  becomes  a  statue  or  anthropomorphic  idol  of 
stone,  just  as  the  sacred  tree  or  post  was  ultimately  de- 
veloped into  an  image  of  wood." 

In  spite  of  much  obvious  groping  in  the  dark  in  this 
and  other  pasi>ages  of  the  Religion  of  the  Semites,  it  is  clear 
that  the  learned  professor  recognised  at  least  one  central 
fact — "  the  sacred  stone  at  Semitic  sanctuaries  was  from 
the  first  an  object  of  worship,  a  sort  of  rude  idol  in  which 
the  divinity  was  somehow  supposed  to  be  present." 
Again,  he  notes  that  "  Jacob's  pillar  is  more  than  a  mere 
landmark,  for  it  is  anointed,  just  as  idols  were  in  an- 
tiquity, and  the  pillar  itself,  not  the  spot  on  which  it  stood, 
is  called  '  the  house  of  God,'  as  if  the  deity  were  conceived 
actually  to  dwell  in  the  stone,  or  manifest  himself  therein 
to  his  worshippers.  And  this  is  the  conception  which  ap- 
pears to  have  been  associated  with  sacred  stones  every- 
where. When  the  Arab  daubed  blood  on  the  nosb,  his 
object  was  to  bring  the  offering  into  direct  contact  with 
the  deity;  and  in  like  manner  the  practice  of  stroking  the 
sacred  stone  with  the  hand  is  identical  with  the  practice 
of  touching  or  stroking  the  garments  or  beard  of  a  man  in 
acts  of  supplication  before  him."  Elsewhere  he  says:  "  So 
far  as  evidence  from  tradition  and  ritual  goes,  we  can  only 
think  of  the  sacred  stone  as  consecrated  by  the  actual 
presence  of  the  godhead,  so  that  whatever  touched  it  was 
brought  into  immediate  contact  with  the  deity."  And  he 
quotes  a  line  from  an  Arab  poet  in  which  the  Arabian  gods 
are  expressly  described  as  "  gods  of  stone." 

It  is  thus  clear  that  sacred  stones  were  common  ob- 
jects of  worship  with  the  Semites  in  general,  and  also  with 
the  Hebrew  people  in  particular.  But  after  the  exclusive 
worship  of  Jahweh,  th?  local  Jewish  god,  had  grown 
obligatory  among  the  Jews,  it  became  the  policy  of  the 
"  Jehovist "  priests  to  Jehovise  and  to  consecrate  the 
sacred  stones  of  Palestine  by  bringing  them  into  connex- 


:|.., 


I20 


SACRED  STONES. 


'  ) 


'I  II 


i 


^n 


li  •' 


■I    Y 
I  ■  1, 


i' 


ion  with  the  Jehovistic  legend  and  the  tales  of  the  Patri- 
archs. Thus  Professor  Cheyne  comments  as  follows  upon 
the  passage  in  Isaiah  where  the  prophet  mocks  the  par- 
tizan  of  the  old  polytheistic  creed  as  a  stone-worshipper — 
"Among  the  smooth  stones  of  the  valley  is  thy  portion: 
They,  they  are  thy  lot:  Even  to  them  hast  thou  poured  a 
drink  ofifering:  Thou  hast  offered  a  meat  offering: 

"  The  large  smooth  stones  referred  to  above  were  the 
fetishes  of  the  primitive  Semitic  races,  and  anointed  with  oil, 
according  to  a  widely  spread  custom.  It  was  such  a  stone 
which  Jacob  took  for  a  pillow,  and  afterwards  consecrated 
by  pouring  oil  upon  it.  The  early  Semites  and  reaction- 
ary idolatrous  Israelites  called  such  stones  Bethels.  .  .  . 
i.e.,  houses  of  El  (the  early  Semitic  word  for  God)*.  .  .  . 
In  spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  *  Jehovist '  who  desired  to 
convert  these  ancient  fetishes  into  memorials  of  patriarchal 
history,  the  old  heathenish  use  of  them  seems  to  have  con- 
tinued especially  in  secluded  places." 

Besides  the  case  of  the  stone  at  Bethel,  there  is  the  later 
one  (in  our  narrative)  when  Jacob  and  Laban  made  a  cove- 
nant, "  and  Jacob  took  a  stone,  and  set  it  up  for  a  pillar. 
And  Jacob  said  unto  his  brethren.  Gather  stones  ;  and 
they  took  stones  and  made  an  heap  :  and  they  did 
eat  there  upon  the  heap."  So,  once  more,  at  Shalem, 
he  erects  an  altar  called  El-Elohe-Israel  ;  he  sets  a 
pillar  upon  the  grave  of  Rachel,  and  another  at  the  place 
at  Luz  where  God  appeared  to  him.  Of  like  import  is 
the  story  of  he  twelve  stones  which  the  twelve  men  take 
out  of  Jordan  to  commemorate  the  passage  of  the  tribes. 
All  are  clearly  attempts  to  Jehovise  these  early  sacred 
stones  or  local  gods  by  connecting  them  with  incidents 
in  the  Jehovistic  version  of  the  ancient  Hebrew  legends. 

That  such  stones,  however,  were  worshipped  as  deities  in 
early  times,  before  the  cult  of  Jahweh  had  become  an  ex- 
clusive one  among  his  devotees,  is  evident  from  the  Jeho- 

*  Say  rather,  "  for  a  god." 


GILGAL  AND  MIZPEH. 


121 


vistic  narrative  itself,  which  has  not  wholly  succeeded  in 
blotting  out  all  traces  of  earlier  religion.  Samuel  judged 
Israel  every  year  at  liethel,  the  place  of  Jacob's  sacred  pil- 
lar: at  Gilgal,  the  place  where  Joshua's  twelve  stones 
were  set  up;  and  at  Mizpeh,  where  stood  the  cairn  sur- 
mounted by  the  pillar  of  Laban's  covenant.  In  other 
words,  these  were  the  sanctuaries  of  the  chief  ancient  gods 
of  Israel.  Samuel  himself  **  took  a  stone  and  set  it  be- 
tween Mizpeh  and  Shem  ";  and  its  very  name,  Eben  czer, 
"the  stone  of  help,"  shows  that  it  was  originally  voi- 
shipped  before  proceeding  on  warlike  expedition., 
though  the  Jehovistic  gloss,  "  saying,  Hitherto  the  Lord 
hath  helped  us,"  does  its  best,  of  course,  to  obscure  the  real 
meaning.  So  at  Peran,  in  New  Guinea,  Mr.  Chalmers  saw 
"  a  large  peculiarly-shaped  stone,"  by  name  Ravai,  con- 
sidered very  sacred.  Sacrifices  are  made  to  it,  and  it  is 
more  particularly  addressed  in  times  of  fighting.  **  Before 
setting  forth,  offerings  are  presented,  with  food,"  and  the 
stone  is  entreated  to  precede  the  warriors  into  battle. 
Wherever  a  stone  has  a  name,  it  is  almost  certainly  of 
mortuary  origin.  It  was  to  the  stone-circle  of  Gilgal, 
once  more,  that  Samuel  directed  Saul  to  go,  saying,  **  I 
will  come  down  unto  thee,  to  offer  burnt-offerings,  and  to 
sacrifice  sacrifices  of  peace-offerings."  It  was  at  the  cairn 
of  Mizpeh  that  Saul  was  chosen  king;  and  after  the  victory 
over  the  Ammonites,  Saul  went  once  more  to  the  great 
Stonehenge  at  Gilj^al  to  *'  renew  the  kingdom,"  and 
"  there  they  made  Saul  king  before  Jahweh  in  Gilgal ;  and 
there  they  sacrificed  sacrifices  of  peace-offerings  before 
Jahweh."  This  passage  is  a  very  instructive  and  im- 
portant one,  because  here  we  see  that  in  the  opinion  of  the 
writer  at  least  Jahweh  was  then  domiciled  at  Gilgal,  amid 
the  other  sacred  stones  of  that  holy  circle. 

Observe,  however,  that  when  Saul  was  directed  to  go 
to  find  his  father's  asses,  he  was  sent  first  to  Rachel's  pillar 
at  Telzah,  and  then  to  the  plain  of  Tabor,  where  he  was  to 
meet  "  three  men  going  up  to  God  [not  to  Jahweh]  at 


i  , 


PV^ 


mtmm 


■Pii 


122 


SACRED  STONES. 


in 


i  Mi: 
:   It^ 


ft  :  I 


I     1 


Bethel,"  evidently  to  sacrifice,  "  one  carrying  three  kids, 
and  another  carrying  three  loaves  of  bread,  and  another 
carrying  a  bottle  of  wine."  These  and  many  other  like 
memorials  of  stone-worship  lie  thickly  scattered  through 
the  early  books  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures,  sometimes 
openly  avowed,  and  sometimes  cloaked  under  a  thin  veil  of 
Jehovism. 

On  the  other  hand,  at  the  present  day,  the  Palestine  ex- 
ploration has  shown  that  no  rude  stone  monuments  exist 
in  Palestine  proper,  though  east  of  the  Jordan  they  are 
common  in  all  parts  of  the  country.  How,  then,  are  we  to 
explain  their  disappearance  ?  Major  Conder  thinks  that 
when  pure  Jehovism  finally  triumphed  under  Hezekiah 
and  Josiah,  the  Jehovists  destroyed  all  these  "  idolatrous  " 
stones  throughout  the  Jewish  dominions,  in  accordance 
with  the  injunctions  in  the  Book  of  Deuteronomy  to  de- 
molish the  religious  emblems  of  the  Canaanites.  Jaliweh, 
the  god  of  the  Hebrews,  was  a  jealous  God,  and  he  would 
tolerate  no  alien  sacred  stones  within  his  own  jurisdic- 
tion 

And  who  or  what  was  this  Jahweh  himself,  this  local  and 
ethnic  god  of  the  Israelites,  who  would  suffer  no  other  god 
or  sacred  monolith  to  live  near  him  ? 

I  will  not  lay  stress  upon  the  point  that  when  Joshua 
was  dying,  according  to  the  legend,  he  "  took  a  great 
stone  "  and  set  it  up  by  an  oak  that  was  by  the  sanctuary 
of  Jahweh,  saying  that  it  had  heard  all  the  words  of 
Jahweh.  That  document  is  too  doubtful  in  terms  to  afford 
us  much  authority.  But  I  will  merely  point  out  that  at 
the  time  when  we  first  se:^m  to  catch  clear  historic 
glimpses  of  true  Jahweh  worship,  we  find  Jahweh,  whoever 
or  whatever  that  mystic  object  might  have  been,  located 
with  his  ark  at  the  Twelve  Stones  at  Gilgal.  It  is  quite 
clear  that  in  "  the  camp  at  Gilgal,"  as  the  later  compilers 
believed,  Jahweh,  god  of  Israel,  who  had  brought  his 
people  up  out  of  Egypt,  remained  till  the  conquest  of  the 
land  was  completed.     But  after  the  end  of  the  conquest, 


THE  NATURE  OF  lAIWEH. 


123 


the  tent  in  which  he  dwelt  was  removed  to  Shiloh;  and  that 
Jahweh  went  with  it  is  clear  from  the  fact  that  Joshua  cast 
lots  for  the  land  there  "  before  Jahweh,  our  God."  He 
was  there  still  when  Hannah  and  her  husband  went  up  to 
Shiloh  to  sacrifice  unto  Jahweh;  and  when  Samuel  min- 
istered unto  Jahweh  before  Eli  the  priest.  That  Jahweh 
made  a  long  stay  at  Shiloh  is,  therefore,  it  would  seem,  a 
true  old  tradition — a  tradition  of  the  age  just  before  the 
historical  beginnings  of  the  Hebrew  annals. 

But  Jahweh  was  an  object  of  portable  size,  for,  omitting 
for  the  present  the  descriptions  in  the  Pentateuch,  which 
seem  likely  to  be  of  late  date,  and  not  too  trustworthy, 
through  their  strenuous  Jehovistic  editing,  he  was  carried 
from  Shiloh  in  his  ark  to  the  front  during  the  great  battle 
with  the   Philistines   at   Ebenezer  ;    and  the   Philistines 
were  afraid,  for  they  said,  "  A  god  is  come  into  the  camp." 
But  when  the  Philistines  captured  the  ark,  the  rival  god, 
Dagon,  fell  down  and  broke  in  pieces — so  Hebrew  legend 
declared — before  the  face  of  Jahweh.    After  the  Philistines 
restored  the  sacred  object,  it  rested  for  a  time  at  Kirjath- 
jearim,  till  David,  on  the  capture  of  Jerusalem  from  the 
Jebusites,  went  down  to  that  place  to  bring  up  from  thence 
the  ark  of  the  god;  and  as  it  went,  on  a  new  cart,  they 
"played  before  Jahweh  on  all  manner  of  instruments," 
and   David   himself   "danced   before  Jahweh."     Jahweh 
was  then  placed  in  the  tent  or  tabernacle  that  David  had 
prepared  for  him,  till  Solomon  built  the  first  temple,  "  the 
house  of  Jahweh,"  and  Jahweh's  ark  was  set  up  in  it,  "  in 
the  oracle  of  the  house,  the  most  holy  place,  even  under 
the  wings  of  the  cherubim."  Just  so  Mr.  Chalmers  tells  us 
that  when  he  was  at  Peran,  in  New  Guinea,  the  peculiarly- 
shaped  holy  stone,  Ravai,  and  the  two  wooden  idols,  Epe 
and  Kivava,  "  made  long  ago  and  considered  very  sacred," 
were  for  the  mon-  ent  "  located  in  an  old  house,  until  all 
the  arrangements  necessary  for  their  removal  to  the  splen- 
did new  dubu  prepared  for  them  are  completed."     And 
so,  too,  at  the  opposite  end  of  the  scale  of  civilisation,  as 


124 


SACRED  STONES. 


li 


ni 


¥ 


I    .   i. 


Mr.  Lang  puts  it,  "  the  fetish-stones  of  Greece  were  those 
which  occupied  the  holy  of  holies  of  the  most  ancient 
temples,  the  mysterious  fanes  within  dark  cedar  or  cypress 
groves,  to  which  men  were  hardly  admitted." 

That  Jahweh  himself,  in  the  most  ancient  traditions  of 
the  race,  was  similarly  concealed  within  his  chest  or  ark  in 
the  holy  of  holies,  is  evident,  I  think,  to  any  attentive 
reader.  It  is  true,  the  later  Jehovistic  glosses  of  Exodus 
and  Deuteronomy,  composed  after  the  Jehovistic  worship 
had  become  purified  and  spiritualised,  do  their  best  to 
darken  the  comprehension  of  this  matter  by  making  the 
presence  of  Jahweh  seem  always  incorporeal ;  and  even  in 
the  earlier  traditions,  the  phrase  "  the  ark  of  the  covenant 
of  Jahweh  "  is  often  substituted  for  the  simpler  and  older 
one,  "  the  ark  of  Jahweh."  But  through  :dl  the  disfigure- 
ments with  which  the  priestly  scribes  of  the  age  of  Josiah 
and  the  sacerdotalists  of  the  return  from  the  captivity 
have  overlaid  the  primitive  story,  we  can  still  see  clearly  in 
many  places  that  Jahweh  himself  was  at  first  personally 
present  in  the  ark  that  covered  him.  And  though  the 
scribes  (evidently  ashamed  of  the  early  worship  they  had 
outlived)  protest  somewhat  vehemently  more  than  once, 
"  There  was  nothing  in  the  ark  save  the  two  tables  of  stone 
which  Moses  put  there  at  Horeb,  when  Jahweh  made  a 
covenant  with  the  children  of  Israel,  when  they  came  out 
of  the  land  of  Egypt,"  yet  this  much  at  least  even  they 
admit — that  the  object  or  objects  concealed  in  the  .irs.  con- 
sisted of  a  sculptured  stone  or  stones;  and  that  to  tl-n.ce  or 
sing  before  this  stone  or  these  stones  was  equivalent  to 
dancing  or  singing  before  the  face  of  Jahweh. 

The  question  whether  the  mysterious  body  concealed  in 
the  ark  was  or  was  not  a  lingam  or  other  phallic  object  I 
purposely  omit  to  discuss  here,  as  not  cognate  to  our 
present  enquiry.  It  is  sufficient  to  insist  that  from  the 
evidence  before  us,  first,  it  was  Jahweh  himself,  and 
second,  it  was  an  object  made  of  stone.     Further  than  that 


5 


ii 


WAS  HE  A  SACRED  STONE. 


125 


*twere  curious  to  enquire,  and  I  for  one  do  not  desire  to 
pry  into  the  mysteries. 

Not  to  push  the  argument  too  far,  then,  we  may  say  this 
much  is  fairly  certain.  The  children  of  Israel  in  early 
times  carried  about  with  them  a  tribal  god,  Jahweh,  whose 
presence  in  their  midst  was  intimately  connected  with  a 
certain  ark  or  chest,  containing  a  stone  object  or  objects. 
This  chest  was  readily  portable,  and  could  be  carried  to 
the  front  in  case  of  warfare.  They  did  not  know  the 
origin  of  the  object  in  the  ark  with  certainty,  but  they  re- 
garded it  emphatically  as  "  Jahweh  their  god,  which  led 
them  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt."  Even  after  its  true 
nature  had  been  spiritualised  away  into  a  great  national 
deity,  the  most  unlimited  and  incorporeal  the  world  has 
ever  known  (as  we  get  him  in  the  best  and  purest  work  of 
the  prophets),  the  imagery  of  later  times  constantly  re- 
turns to  the  old  idea  of  a  stone  pillar  or  menhir.  In  the 
embellished  account  of  the  exodus  from  Egypt,  Jahweh 
goes  before  the  Israelites  as  a  pillar  or  monolith  of  cloud 
by  day  and  of  fire  by  night.  According  to  Levitical  law 
his  altar  must  be  built  of  unhewn  stone,  "  for  if  thou  lift  up 
thy  tool  upon  it  thou  hast  polluted  it."  It  is  as  a  Rock 
that  the  prophets  often  figuratively  describe  Jahweh, 
using  the  half-forgotten  language  of  an  earlier  day  to 
clothe  their  own  sublimer  and  more  purified  conceptions. 
It  is  to  the  Rock  of  Israel — the  sacred  stone  of  the  tribe — 
that  they  look  for  succour.  Nay,  even  when  Josiah  ac- 
cepted the  forged  roll  of  the  law  and  promised  to  abide  by 
it,  "  the  king  stood  by  a  pillar  (a  menhir)  and  made  a 
covenant  before  Jahweh."  Even  to  the  last  we  see  in 
vague  glimpses  the  real  original  nature  of  the  worship  of 
that  jealous  god  who  caused  Dagon  to  break  in  pieces 
before  him,  and  would  allow  no  other  sacred  stones  to  re- 
main undemolished  within  his  tribal  boundaries. 

I  do  not  see,  therefore,  how  we  can  easily  avoid  the 
obvious  inference  that  Jahweh,  the  god  of  the  Hebrews, 
who  later  became  sublimated  and  etherealised  into  the 


m 


!  1 .1 


.!i.: 


!1^  f 


?  f' 


126 


SACRED  STONES. 


God  of  Christianity,  was  in  his  origin  nothing  more  nor 
less  than  the  ancestral  sacred  stone  of  the  people  of  Israel, 
however  sculptured,  and  perhaps,  in  the  very  last  resort  of 
all,  the  unhewn  monumental  pillar  of  some  early  Semitic 
sheikh  or  chieftain. 


I'i'i 


I 


■ 


i  if 


(|:i 


1 


ORIGINALLY  GRAVE-MARKS. 


127 


CHAPTER   VI. 


SACRED   STAKES. 

Milton  speaks  in  a  famous  sonnet  of  the  time  "  when 
all  our  fathers  worshipped  stocks  and  stones."  That  fa- 
miliar and  briefly  contemptuous  phrase  of  the  Puritan 
poet  does  really  cover  the  vast  majority  of  objects  of 
worship  for  the  human  race  at  all  times  and  in  all  places. 
We  have  examined  the  stones  ;  the  stocks  lii'ist  now  come 
in  for  their  fair  share  of  attention.  They  need  not, 
however,  delay  us  quite  so  long  as  their  sister  deities,  both 
because  they  are  on  the  whole  less  important  in  them- 
selves, and  because  their  development  from  grave-marks 
into  gods  and  idols  is  almost  absolutely  parallel  to  that 
which  we  have  already  followed  out  in  detail  in  the  case 
of  the  standing  stone  or  megalithic  monument. 

Stakes  or  wooden  posts  are  often  used  all  the  world 
over  as  marks  of  an  interment.  Like  other  grave-marks, 
they  also  share  naturally  in  the  honours  paid  to  the  ghost 
or  nascent  god.  But  they  are  less  important  as  elements 
in  the  growth  of  religion  than  standing  stones  for  two 
distinct  reasons.  In  the  first  place,  a  stake  or  post  most 
often  marks  the  interment  of  a  person  of  little  social  con- 
sideration ;  chiefs  and  great  men  have  usually  stone 
monuments  erected  in  their  honour  ;  the  commonalty 
have  to  be  satisfied  with  wooden  marks,  as  one  may  ob- 
serve to  this  day  at  Pere  Lachaise,  or  any  other  great 
Christian  cemetery.  In  the  second  place,  the  stone  monu- 
ment is  far  more  lasting  and  permanent  than  the  wooden 
one.     Each  of  these  points  counts  for  something.     For  it 


i 


ii. 


n 


' 


128 


SACRED  STAKES. 


m 


i 


fell 


ill 

F:! 


I:  ^ 


i:)  li 


is  chiefs  and  great  men  whose  ghosts  most  often  grow  into 
gods  ;  and  it  is  the  oldest  ghosts,  the  oldest  gods,  the  old- 
est monuments  that  are  always  the  most  sacred.  For  both 
these  reasons,  then,  the  otake  is  less  critical  than  the  stone 
in  the  history  of  religion. 

Nevertheless,  it  has  its  own  special  importance.  As  the 
sacred  stone  derives  ultimately  from  the  great  boulder 
piled  above  the  grave  to  keep  down  the  corpse,  so  the 
stake,  I  believe,  derives  from  the  sharp-pointed  stick 
driven  through  the  body  to  pin  it  down  as  we  saw  in  the 
third  chapter,  and  still  so  employed  in  Christian  England 
to  prevent  suicides  from  walking.  Such  a  stake  or  pole 
is  usually  permitted  to  protrude  from  the  ground,  so  as  to 
warn  living  men  of  the  neighbourhood  of  a  spirit. 

At  a  very  early  date,  however,  the  stake,  I  fancy,  be- 
came a  mere  grave-mark  ;  and  though,  owing  to  its  com- 
parative inconspicuousness,  it  obtains  relatively  little  no- 
tice, it  is  now  and  always  has  been  by  far  the  most  com- 
mon mode  of  preserving  the  niemory  of  the  spot  where  a 
person  lies  buried.  A  good  example,  which  will  throw 
light  upon  many  subsequent  modifications,  is  given  by 
Mr.  Wyatt  Gill  from  Port  Moresby  in  New  Guinea.  "  The 
body,"  he  says,  "  was  buried.  At  the  side  was  set  up  a 
stake,  to  which  were  tied  the  spear,  club,  bow  and  arro"' 
of  the  deceased,  but  broken,  to  prevent  theft.  A  littk 
beyond  was  the  grave  of  a  woman  :  her  cooking  utensils, 
grass  petticoats,  etc.,  hung  up  on  the  stake."  Similar 
customs,  he  adds,  are  almost  universal  in  Polynesia. 

Though  worship  of  stakes  or  wooden  posts  is  common 
all  over  the  world,  I  can  give  but  few  quite  unequivocal 
instances  of  such  worship  being  paid  to  a  post  actually 
known  to  surmount  -in  undoubted  grave.  Almost  the 
best  direct  evidence  I  can  obtain  is  the  case  of  the  grave- 
pole  in  Buru,  already  quoted  from  Mr.  H.  O.  Forbes. 
But  the  following  account  of  a  Samoyed  place  of  sacri- 
fice, extracted  from  Baron  Nordenskiold's  Voyage  of  the 
Vega,  is  certainly  suggestive.     On  a  hillock  on  Vaygats 


*■% 


WORSHIP  OF  STAKES. 


129 


Island  the  Swedish  explorer  found  a  number  of  reindeer 
skulls,  so  arranged  that  they  formed  a  close  thicket  of 
antlers.  Around  lay  other  bones,  both  of  bears  and 
reindeer  ;  and  in  the  midst  of  all  "  the  mighty  beings 
to  whom  all  this  splendour  was  offered.  They  con- 
sisted of  hundreds  of  small  wooden  sticks,  the  upper 
portions  of  which  were  carved  very  clumsily  in  the  form 
of  the  human  countenance,  most  of  them  from  fifteen  to 
twenty,  but  some  of  them  three  hundred  and  seventy 
centimetres  in  length.  They  were  all  stuck  in  the  ground 
on  the  southeast  part  of  the  eminence.  Near  the  place 
of  sacrifice  there  were  to  be  seen  pieces  of  driftwood  and 
remains  of  the  fireplace  at  which  the  sacrificial  meal  was 
prepared.  Our  guide  told  us  that  at  these  meals  the 
mouths  of  the  idols  were  besmeared  with  blood  and  wetted 
with  brandy  ;  and  the  former  statement  was  confirmed 
by  the  large  spots  of  blood  which  were  found  on  most  of 
the  large  idols  below  the  holes  intended  to  represent  the 
mouth."  At  a  far  earlier  date,  Stephen  Burrough  in  1556 
writes  as  follows  to  much  the  same  effect  in  his  interesting 
narrative  printed  in  Hakluyt  :  "  There  I  met  againe  with 
Loshak,  and  went  on  shore  with  him,  and  he  brought  me 
to  a  heap  of  Samoeds  idols,  which  were  in  number  about 
300,  the  worst  and  the  most  unartificiall  worke  that  ever  I 
saw  :  the  eyes  and  mouthes  of  sundrie  of  them  were 
bloodie,  they  had  the  shape  of  men,  women,  and  children, 
very  grosly  wrought,  and  that  which  they  had  made  for 
other  parts  was  also  sprinkled  with  blood.  Some  of  their 
idols  were  an  olde  sticke  with  two  or  three  notches,  made 
with  a  knife  in  it.  There  was  one  of  their  sleds  broken 
and  lay  by  the  heape  of  idols,  and  there  I  saw  a  deers 
skinne  which  the  foules  had  spoyled  :  and  before  certaine 
of  their  idols  blocks  were  made  as  high  as  their  mouthes  ; 
being  all  bloody,  I  thought  that  to  be  the  table  wheron 
they  offered  their  sacrifice." 

In  neither  of  these  accounts,  it  is  true,  is  it  distinctly 
mentioned  that  the  place  of  sacrifice  was  a  Samoyed  ceme- 


a 


m 


' 


f . 


I/:  J 


'Is', 


!'■; 


'i 


ji 


130 


SACRED  STAKES. 


tery:  but  I  believe  this  to  be  the  case,  partly  from  analogy, 
and  partly  because  Nordenskiold  mentions  elsewhere  that 
an  upturned  sled  is  a  frequent  sign  of  a  Samoyed  grave* 
Compare  also  the  following  account  of  a  graveyard 
among  nominally  Christian  Ostyak  Siberians,  also  from 
Nordenskiold  :  "  The  corpses  were  placed  in  large  coffins 
above  ground,  at  which  almost  always  a  cross  was 
erected."  [The  accompanying  wocdcut  shews  that  these 
crosses  were  rude  wooden  stakes  with  one  or  two  cross- 
bars.] "  In  one  of  the  crosses  a  sacred  picture  was  in- 
serted which  must  be  considered  a  further  proof  that  a 
Christian  rested  in  the  coffin.  Notwithstanding  this,  we 
found  some  clothes,  which  had  belonged  to  the  departed, 
hanging  on  a  bush  beside  the  grave,  together  with  a  bundle 
containing  food,  principally  dried  fish.  At  the  graves  of 
the  richer  natives  the  survivors  are  even  said  to  place 
along  with  food  some  rouble  notes,  in  order  that  the  de- 
parted may  not  be  altogether  without  ready  money  on  his 
entrance  into  the  other  world." 

To  complete  the  parallel,  I  ought  to  add  that  money 
was  also  deposited  on  the  sacrificial  place  on  Vaygats 
Island.  Of  another  such  sacrificial  place  on  Yalmal, 
Nordenskiold  says,  after  describing  a  pile  of  bones,  rein- 
deer skulls,  and  walrus  jaws  :  "  In  the  middle  of  the  heap 
of  bones  stood  four  erect  pieces  of  wood.  Two  consisted 
of  sticks  a  metre  in  length,  with  notches  cut  in  them.  .  .  . 
The  two  others,  which  clearly  were  the  proper  idols  of 
this  place  of  sacrifice,  consisted  of  driftwood  roots,  on 
which  some  carvings  had  been  made  to  distinguish  the 
eyes,  mouth,  and  nose.  The  parts  of  the  pieces  of  wood, 
intended  to  represent  the  eyes  and  mouth,  had  recently 
been  besmeared  with  blood,  and  there  still  lay  at  the  heap 
of  bones  the  entrails  of  a  newly  killed  reindeer." 

Indeed,  I  learn  from  another  source  that  "  the  Sa- 
moyedes  feed  the  wooden  images  of  the  dead  "  ;  while  an 
instance  from  Erman  helps  further  to  confirm  the  same 
conclusion.     According  to  that  acute  writer,  among  the 


I 


FROM  STAKE  TO  WOODEN  IDOL. 


131 


f 
11 


n 


Ostyaks  of  Eastern  Siberia  there  is  found  a  most  in- 
teresting custom,  in  which,  says  Dr.  Tylor,  "  we  see  the 
transition  from  the  image  of  the  dead  man  to  the  actual 
idol."  When  a  man  dies,  they  set  up  a  rude  wooden 
image  of  him  in  the  yurt,  which  receives  offerings  at  every 
meal  and  has  honours  paid  to  it,  while  the  widow  continu- 
ally embraces  and  caresses  it.  As  a  general  rule,  these 
images  are  buried  at  the  end  of  three  years  or  so  :  but 
sometimes  "  the  image  of  a  shaman  (native  sorcerer)," 
says  Tylor,  "  is  set  up  permanently,  and  remains  as  a  saint 
for  ever."  For  "  saint "  I  should  say  "god  "  ;  and  we  see 
the  transformation  at  once  completed.  Indeed,  Erman 
adds  acutely  about  the  greater  gods  of  the  Ostyaks  : 
"  That  these  latter  also  have  a  1  istorical  origin,  that  they 
were  originally  monuments  of  distinguished  men,  to  which 
prescription  and  the  interest  of  the  Shamans  gave  by  de- 
grees an  arbitrary  meaning  and  importance,  seems  to  me 
not  liable  to  doubt." 

With  regard  to  the  blood  smeared  upon  such  Siberian 
wooden  idols,  it  must  be  remembered  that  bowls  of  blood 
are  common  offerings  to  the  dead  ;  and  Dr.  Robertson 
Smith  himself,  no  friendly  witness  in  this  matter,  has  com- 
pared the  blood-offerings  to  ghosts  with  those  to  deities. 
In  the  eleventh  book  of  the  Odyssey,  for  example,  the 
ghosts  drink  greedily  of  the  sacrificial  blood  ;  and  libations 
of  gore  form  a  special  feature  in  Greek  offerings  to  heroes. 
That  blood  was  offered  to  the  sacred  stones  we  have  al- 
ready seen  ;  and  we  noticed  that  there  as  here  it  was 
specially  smeared  upon  the  parts  representing  the  mouth. 
Offerings  of  blood  to  gods,  or  pouring  of  blood  on  altars, 
are  too  common  to  demand  particular  notice  ;  and  we 
shall  also  recur  to  that  part  of  the  subject  when  we  come  to 
consider  the  important  questions  of  sacrifice  and  sacra- 
ment. I  will  only  add  here  that  according  to  Maimonides 
the  Sabians  looked  on  blood  as  the  nourishment  of  the 
gods  ;  while  the  Hebrew  Jahweh  asks  indignantly  in  the 


m 


I 

l!      ,'    I 


llh  I 


1-;    ' 


f'i  '  ;  :  i 


i   I 


i  I 


I    ! 


132 


SACRED  STAKES. 


fiftieth  Psalm,  "  Will  I  eat  the  flesh  of  bulls,  or  drink  the 
blood  of  goats  ?  " 

To  pass  on  to  more  unequivocal  cases  of  stake-worship, 
where  we  can  hardly  doubt  that  the  stake  represents  a 
dead  man,  Captain  Cook  noticed  that  in  the  Society  Is- 
lands "  the  carved  wooden  images  at  burial-places  were 
not  considered  mere  memorials,  but  abodes  into  which  the 
souls  of  the  departed  retired."  So  Ellis  observes  of 
Polynesians  generally  that  the  sacred  objects  might  be 
either  mere  stocks  and  stones,  or  carved  wooden  images, 
from  six  to  eight  feet  long  down  to  as  many  inches.  Some 
of  these  were  to  represent  "  tii,"  divine  manes  or  spirits 
of  the  dead  ;  while  others  were  to  represent  "  tu,"  or 
deities  of  higher  rank  and  power.  To  my  mind,  this  is 
almost  a  distinction  without  a  difference  ;  the  first  being 
ghosts  of  recently  deceased  ancestors,  the  second  ghosts 
of  remoter  progenitors.  The  ancient  Araucanians  again 
fixed  over  a  tomb  an  upright  log,  "  rudely  carved  to  rep- 
resent the  human  frame."  After  the  death  of  New  Zea- 
land chiefs,  wooden  images,  20  to  40  feet  high,  were 
erected  as  monuments.  I  might  easily  multiply  instances ; 
but  I  refrain  lest  the  list  grow  tedious. 

Dr.  Codrington  notes  that  the  large  mouths  and  lolling 
tongues  of  many  New  Zealand  and  Polynesian  gods  are 
due  to  the  habit  of  smearing  the  mouth  with  blood  and 
other  offerings. 

Where  men  preserve  the  corpses  of  their  dead,  images 
are  not  so  likely  to  grow  up  ;  but  where  fear  of  the  dead 
has  brought  about  the  practice  of  burial  or  burning,  it  is 
reasonable  that  the  feelings  of  affection  which  prompted 
gifts  and  endearments  to  the  mummy  in  the  first  stage  of 
thought  should  seek  some  similar  material  outlet  under 
the  altered  circumstances.  Among  ourselves,  a  photo- 
graph, a  portrait,  the  toys  of  a  dead  child,  are  preserved 
and  cherished.  Among  savages,  ruder  representations 
become  necessary.  They  bury  the  actual  corpse  safely 
out  of  sight,  but  make  some  rough  wooden  imitation  to 


1 


f 


1 


IDOLS  REPLACE  THE  CORPSE. 


133 


represent  it.  Thus  it  does  not  surprise  us  to  find  that 
while  the  Marianne  Islanders  keep  the  dried  bodies  of 
their  dead  ancestors  in  their  huts  as  household  gods,  and 
expect  them  to  give  oracles  out  of  their  skulls,  the  New 
Zealanders,  on  the  other  hand,  "  set  up  memorial  idols 
of  deceased  persons  near  the  burial-place,  talking  affec- 
tionately to  them  as  if  still  alive,  and  casting  garments  to 
them  when  they  pass  by,"  while  they  also  "  preserve  in 
their  houses  small  carved  wooden  images,  each  dedicated 
to  the  spirit  of  an  ancestor."  The  Coast  Negroes  "  place 
several  earthen  images  on  the  graves."  Some  Papuans, 
"  after  a  grave  is  filled  up,  collect  round  an  idol,  and  offer 
provisions  to  it."  The  Javans  dress  up  an  image  in  the 
clothes  of  the  deceased.  So,  too,  of  the  Caribs  of  the  West 
Indies,  we  learn  that  they  "  carved  little  images  in  the 
shape  in  which  they  believed  spirits  to  have  appeared  to 
them  ;  and  some  human  figures  bore  the  names  of  ances- 
tors in  memory  of  them."  From  such  little  images,  ob- 
viously substituted  for  the  dead  body  which  used  once  to 
be  preserved  and  affectionately  tended,  are  derived,  I  be- 
lieve, most  of  the  household  gods  of  the  world — the  Lares 
and  Penates  of  the  Romans,  the  huacas  of  the  Peruvians, 
the  teraphim  of  the  Semites. 

How  absolutely  image  and  ancestor  are  identified  we 
can  see  among  the  Tenimber  Islanders,  with  whom  "  the 
matmate  are  the  spirits  of  their  ancestors  which  are  wor- 
shipped as  guardian  spirits  or  household  gods.  They  are 
supposed  to  enter  the  house  through  an  opening  in  the 
roof,  and  to  take  up  their  abode  temporarily  in  the  skulls, 
or  in  images  of  wood  or  ivory,  in  order  to  partake  of  the 
offerings." 

A  few  more  facts  in  the  same  direction  may  help  to 
bring  out  in  still  stronger  relief  this  close  equivalence  of 
the  corpse  and  the  image.  A  New  Guinea  mother  keeps 
the  mummied  body  of  her  child,  and  carries  it  about  with 
her  ;  whereas  a  West  African  mother,  living  in  a  tribe 
where  terror  of  the  dead  has  induced  the  practice  of  burial, 


m 


i\  !  I 


ill' 


i  1  ! 


m 


M 


II 


I    I 


134 


SACKED  STAKES. 


makes  a  little  image  of  her  lost  darling  out  of  a  gourd  or 
calabash,  wraps  it  in  skins,  and  feeds  it  or  puts  it  to  sleep 
like  a  living  baby.  Bastian  saw  Indian  women  in  Peru, 
who  had  lost  an  infant,  carrying  about  on  their  backs  a 
wooden  doll  to  represent  it.  At  a  somewhat  higher  level, 
"  the  spiritual  beings  of  the  Algonquins,"  says  Dr.  Tylor, 
to  whom  I  owe  not  a  few  of  these  instances,  "  were  repre- 
sented by,  and  in  language  completely  identified  with,  the 
carved  wooden  heads  "  (note  this  point)  "  or  more  com- 
plete images,  to  which  worship  and  sacrifice  were  offered." 
In  all  these  instances  we  see  cleaiiy,  I  think,  the  course 
of  the  genesis  of  household  deities.  In  Siani,  the  ashes 
of  the  dead  are  similarly  moulded  into  Buddhist  images, 
which  are  afterwards  worshipped  as  household  gods. 

Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  has  collected  several  interesting 
examples  some  of  which  I  will  borrow,  as  showing  inci- 
dentally how  much  the  growth  of  the  idol  or  image  de- 
pends upon  such  abstraction  of  the  re'  'lody  for  burial  or 
its  equivalent.  While  a  deceased  kit  "  Congo  is  being 
embalmed,  a  figure  is  set  up  in  the  palace  to  represent  him, 
and  is  daily  furnished  with  meat  and  drink.  When 
Charles  VI.  of  France  was  buried,  "  over  the  coffin  was  an 
image  of  the  late  king,  bearing  a  rich  crown  of  gold  and 
diamonds,  and  holding  two  shields ....  This  image  was 
dressed  with  cloth  of  gold.  ...  In  this  state  was  he 
solemnly  carried  to  the  church  of  Notre  Dame."  Ma- 
dame de  Motteville  says  of  the  father  of  the  great  Conde, 
"  The  effigy  of  this  prince  was  waited  upon  for  three  days, 
as  was  customary  " — forty  days  having  been  the  original 
time  during  which  food  was  supplied  to  such  effigies  at 
the  usual  hours.  Monstrelet  describes  a  like  figure  used 
at  the  burial  of  Henry  V.  of  England  :  and  the  West- 
minster Abbey  images  already  noticed  belong  to  the  same 
category. 

As  in  the  case  of  sacred  stones,  once  more,  I  am  quite 
ready  to  admit  that  when  one  e  the  sanctity  of  certain 
stakes  or  wooden  poles  came  to  be  generally  recognised. 


k1^ 


THE  SEMITIC  ASUERA. 


135 


r 


it  would  be  a  simple  transference  of  feeling  to  suppose 
that  any  stake,  arbitrarily  set  up,  might  become  the  shrine 
or  home  of  an  indwelling  spirit.  Thus  we  are  told  that 
the  Brazilian  tribes  "  set  up  stakes  in  the  ground,  and 
make  offerings  before  them  to  appease  their  deities  or 
demons."  So  also  we  are  assured  that  among  the  Dinkas 
of  the  White  Nile,  "  the  missionaries  saw  an  old  woman 
in  her  hut  offering  the  first  of  her  food  before  a  short  thick 
stafi  planted  in  the  ground."  But  in  neither  of  these  cases 
is  there  necessarily  anything  to  show  that  the  spot  where 
the  staff  was  set  up  was  not  a  place  of  burial  ;  while  in 
the  second  instance  this  is  even  probable,  as  hut  interments 
are  extremely  common  in  Africa.  I  will  quote  oiie  other 
instance  only,  for  its  illustrative  value  in  a  subsequent  con- 
nexion. In  the  Society  Islands,  rude  logs  are  clothed  in 
native  cloth  (like  Monigan's  idol)  and  anointed  with  oil, 
receiving:  adoration  and  sacrifice  as  the  dwelling-place  of 
a  deity.  This  custom  is  parallel  to  that  of  the  Caribs,  who 
took  a  bone  of  a  dead  friend  from  the  grave,  wrapped  it  up 
in  cotton,  and  enquired  of  it  for  oracles. 

Mr.  Savage  Landor,  in  his  interesting  work  The  Hairy 
Ainu,  figures  and  describes  some  curious  grave-stakes  of 
those  Japanese  aborigines.  The  stakes  on  the  men's 
graves  are  provided  with  a  phallic  protuberance  ;  those  on 
the  women's  with  an  equally  phallic  perforation.  T'lii 
fact  helps  to  illustrate  the  phallicism  of  sacred  stones  in 
Syria  and  elsewhere. 

Among  the  Semitic  peoples,  always  specially  interesting 
to  us  from  their  genetic  connexion  with  Judaism  and 
Christianity,  the  worship  of  stakes  usually  took  the  form 
of  adoration  paid  to  the  curious  log  of  wood  described  as 
an  ashera.  What  kind  of  object  an  ashcra  was  we  learn 
from  the  injunction  in  Deuteronomy,  "  Thou  shalt  not 
plant  an  ashera  of  any  kind  of  wood  beside  the  altar  of 
Jahweh."  This  prohibition  is  clearly  parallel  to  that 
against  any  hewn  stone  or  "  grpven  image."  But  the 
Semites  in  general  worshipped  as  a  rule  at  a  rude  stone 


\   . 


w 


msm 


!  !  i 


•ill  ! 

i 


^'1 


i 


'■  I 


lis 


IS;       ; 


r:i  .  i 


fi. 


136 


SACRED  STAKES. 


altar,  beside  which  stood  an  ashera,  under  a  green  tree, — 
all  three  of  the  great  sacred  objects  of  humanity  being  thus 
present  together.  A  similar  combination  is  not  uncom- 
mon in  India,  where  sacred  stone  and  wooden  image  stand 
often  under  the  shade  of  the  same  holy  peepul  tree.  "  The 
ashera,"  says  Professor  Robertson  Smith,  "  is  a  sacred 
symbol,  the  seat  of  the  deity,  and  perhaps  ^.he  name  itself, 
as  G.  Hoffmann  has  suggested,  means  nothing  more  than 
the  *  mark '  of  the  divine  presence."  Those  who  have 
followed  me  so  far  in  the  present  work,  however,  will  be 
more  likely  to  conclude  that  it  meant  originally  the  mark 
of  a  place  where  an  ancestor  lay  buried.  "  Every  altar," 
says  Professor  Smith,  again,  "  had  its  ashera,  even  such 
altars  as  in  the  popular  preprophetic  forms  of  the  Hebrew 
religion  were  dedicated  to  Jehovah." 

The  Semitic  sacred  pole  was  treated  in  most  respects 
like  the  other  grave-stakes  and  idols  we  have  hitherto  con- 
sidered ;  for  an  Assyrian  monument  from  Khorsabad,. 
figured  by  Rawlinson,  represents  an  ornamental  pole,^ 
planted  beside  an  altar  ;  priests  stand  before  it  engaged 
in  an  act  of  worship,  and  touch  the  pole  with  their  hands, 
"  or  perhaps,"  says  Professor  Smith,  "  anoint  it  with  some 
liquid  substance."  That  the  ashera  was  also  draped,  like 
the  logs  of  the  Society  Islanders,  or  Monigan's  Irish  idol, 
we  learn  from  the  famous  passage  in  Second  Kings 
(xxiii.  7)  where  it  is  said  that  the  women  "  wove  hangings 
for  the  ashera."  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  illustrates  this 
passage  by  the  parallel  of  the  sacred  erica  at  Byblits,  which 
was  "  a  mere  dead  stump,  for  it  was  cut  down  by  Isis  and 
presented  to  the  Byblians  wrapped  in  a  linen  cloth  and 
anointed  with  myrrh  like  a  corpse.  It  therefore  repre- 
sented the  dead  god  "  (Osiris,  or  rather  in  its  origin 
Adonis).  "  But  as  a  mere  stump,  it  also  resembles  the  He  - 
brew  ashera."  So  near  may  a  man  come  to  +he  perception 
of  a  truth,  and  yet  so  utterly  may  he  miss  its  actual  import. 

I  will  dwell  no  longer  upon  these  more  or  less  remote 
derivatives  of  the  grave-stake.     I  will  only  say  briefly  that 


!i 


CHRISTIAN  IMAGES. 


137 


in  my  opinion  all  wooden  idols  or  images  are  directly  or 
indirectly  descended  from  the  wooden  headpost  or  still 
more  primitive  sepulchral  pole.  Not  of  course  that  I  sup- 
pose every  wooden  image  to  have  been  necessarily  once 
itself  a  funereal  monument.  Donatello's  Magdalen  in  San 
Giovanni  at  Florence,  the  blue-robed  and  star-spangled 
Madonna  of  the  wayside  shrine,  have  certainly  no  such 
immediate  origin.  But  I  do  believe  that  the  habit  of  mak- 
ing and  worshipping  wooden  images  arose  in  the  way  I 
have  pointed  out ;  and  to  those  who  would  accuse  me  of 
"gross  Euhemerism,"  I  would  once  more  remark  that 
even  in  these  highest  Christian  instances  the  objects  of 
veneration  are  themselves  in  the  last  resort  admitted  to 
have  been  at  one  time  Galilean  women.  Nay,  is  not  even 
the  wayside  shrine  itself  in  most  Catholic  countries  more 
often  than  not  the  mortuary  chapel  erected  where  some 
wayfarer  has  died  a  violent  death,  by  murder,  lightning, 
accident,  or  avalanche  ? 


Hi 


^^^y 
W 


f  li 


r± 


i 


I 


r 


V ) 


[!''■'' 


I  ?:;* 


'  i 


r 


II 


IV ' 


:i|i  ; 


138 


SACRED   TREES. 


CHAPTER  VII. 


SACRED    TREES. 


The  sacred  tree  stands  less  obviously  in  the  direct  line 
of  ancestry  of  gods  and  of  God  than  the  sacred  stone  and 
the  sacred  stake  which  we  have  just  considered.  I  would 
willingly  pass  it  over,  therefore,  in  this  long  preliminary 
inquisition,  could  I  safely  do  so,  in  order  to  progress  at 
once  to  the  specific  consideration  of  the  God  of  Israel  and 
the  rise  of  Monotheism.  But  the  tree  is  nevertheless  so 
closely  linked  with  the  two  other  main  objects  of  human 
worship  that  I  hardly  see  how  I  can  avoid  considering  it 
here  in  the  same  connexion :  especially  as  in  the  end  it  has 
important  implications  with  regard  to  the  tree  of  the  cross, 
as  well  as  to  the  True  Vine,  and  many  other  elements  of 
Christian  faith  and  Christian  symbolism.  I  shall  therefore 
give  it  a  short  chapter  as  I  pass,  premising  that  I  have 
already  entered  into  the  subject  at  greater  length  in  my 
excursus  On  the  Origin  of  Tree-Worship,  appended  to 
my  verse  translation  of  the  Attis  of  Catullus. 

The  worship  of  sacred  trees  is  almost  as  widely  diffused 
over  the  whole  world  as  the  worship  of  dead  bodies,  mum- 
mies, relics,  graves,  sacred  stones,  sacred  stakes,  and  stone 
or  wooden  idols.  The  great  authorities  on  the  subject  of 
Tree-Worship  are  Mannhardt's  Banmkultus  and  Mr.  J.  G. 
Frazer's  The  Golden  Bough.  Neither  of  those  learned  and 
acute  writers,  however,  has  fully  seen  the  true  origin  of 
worship  from  funeral  practices:  and  therefore  it  becomes 
necessary  to  go  over  the  same  ground  again  briefly  here 
from  the  point  of  view  afforded  us  by  the  corpse-theory 


f  > 


THE  TREE  IN  MYTH. 


139 


and  ghost-theory  of  the  basis  of  religion.  I  shall  hope  to 
add  something  to  their  valuable  results,  and  also  incident- 
ally to  show  that  all  the  main  objects  of  worship  together 
leads  us  back  unanimously  to  the  Cult  of  the  Dead  as  their 
common  starting-point. 

Let  us  begin  in  this  instance  (contrary  to  our  previous 
practice)  by  examining  and  endeavouring  to  understand 
a  few  cases  of  the  behaviour  of  tree-spirits  in  various 
mythologies.  Virgil  tells  us  in  the  Third  -^neid  how,  on 
a  certain  occasion,  ^Eneas  was  offering  a  sacrifice  on  a 
tumulus  crowned  with  dogwood  and  myrtle  bushes.  He 
endeavoured  to  pluck  up  some  of  these  by  the  roots,  in 
order  to  cover  the  altar,  as  was  customary,  with  leaf-clad 
branches.  As  he  did  so,  the  first  bush  which  he  tore  up 
astonished  him  by  exuding  drops  of  liquid  blood,  which 
trickled  and  fell  upon  the  soil  beneath.  He  tried  again, 
and  again  the  tree  bled  human  gore.  On  the  third  trial, 
a  groan  was  heard  proceeding  from  the  tumulus,  and  a 
voice  assured  ^neas  that  the  barrow  on  which  he  stood 
covered  the  murdered  remains  of  his  friend  Polydorus. 

Now,  in  this  typical  and  highly  illustrative  myth — no 
doubt  an  ancient  and  well-known  story  incorporated  by 
Virgil  in  his  great  poem — we  see  that  the  tree  which  grows 
upon  a  barrow  is  itself  regarded  as  the  representative  and 
embodiment  of  the  dead  man's  soul,  just  as  elsewhere  the 
snake  which  glides  from  the  tomb  of  Anchises  is  regarded 
as  the  embodied  spirit  of  the  hero,  and  just  as  the  owls  and 
bats  which  haunt  sepulchral  caves  are  often  identified  in 
all  parts  of  the  world  with  the  souls  of  the  departed. 

Similar  stories  of  bleeding  or  speaking  trees  or  bushes 
occur  abundantly  elsewhere.  "  When  the  oak  is  being 
felled,"  says  Aubrey,  in  his  Remains  of  Gentilisme,  "  it 
gives  a  kind  of  shriekes  and  groanes  that  may  be  heard  a 
mile  off,  as  if  it  were  the  genius  of  the  oak  lamenting.  E. 
Wyld,  Esq.,  hath  beared  it  severall  times."  Certain  In- 
dians, says  Bastian,  dare  not  cut  a  particular  plant,  because 
there  comes  out  of  it  a  red  juice  which  they  take  for  its 


Ill 


li      ! 


mi 


h-' 


,  r 


fill 


'1,    ' 


i''' 


i 


i|  I  i  I 


140 


SACRED  TREES. 


blood.  I  myself  remember  hearing  as  a  boy  in  Canada 
that  wherever  Sanguinaria  Canadensis,  the  common  Amer- 
ican bloodroot,  grew  in  the  woods,  an  Indian  had  once 
been  buried,  and  that  the  red  drops  of  juice  which  exuded 
from  the  stem  when  one  picked  the  flowers  were  the  dead 
man's  blood.  In  Samoa,  says  Mr.  Turner,  the  special 
abode  of  Tuiliti,  King  of  Fiji,  was  a  grove  of  large  and 
durable  afzelia  trees.  "  No  one  dared  cut  that  timber. 
A  story  is  told  of  a  party  from  Upolu  who  once  attempted 
it,  and  the  consequence  was  that  blood  flowed  from  the 
tree,  and  that  the  sacrilegious  strangers  all  took  ill  and 
died."  Till  1855,  says  Mannhardt,  there  was  a  sacred 
larch-tree  at  Nauders  in  the  Tyrol,  which  was  thought  to 
bleed  whenever  it  was  cut.  In  some  of  these  cases,  it  is 
true,  we  do  not  actually  know  that  the  trees  grew  on 
tumuli,  but  this  point  is  specially  noticed  about  Polydorus's 
dogwood,  and  is  probably  implied  in  the  Samoan  case,  as 
I  gather  from  the  title  given  to  the  spirit  as  king  of  Fiji. 

In  other  instances,  however,  such  a  doubt  does  not  ex- 
ist. We  are  expressly  told  that  it  is  the  souls  of  the  dead 
which  are  believed  to  animate  the  speaking  or  bleeding 
trees.  "  The  Dieyerie  tribe  of  South  AustraHa,"  says  Mr. 
Frazer,  "  regard  as  very  sacred  certain  trees  which  are  sup- 
posed to  be  their  fathers  transformed;  hence  they  will  not 
cut  the  trees  down,  and  protest  against  settlers  doing  so." 
Some  of  the  Philippine  Islanders  believe  that  the  souls  of 
their  forefathers  inhabit  certain  trees,  which  they  therefore 
spare.  If  obliged  to  fell  one  of  these  sacred  trunks,  they 
excuse  themselves  by  saying  that  it  was  the  priests  who 
made  them  fell  it. 

Now,  how  did  this  connexion  between  the  tree  and  the 
ghost  or  ancestor  grow  up  ?  In  much  the  same  way,  I 
imagine,  as  the  connexion  between  the  sacred  stone  or  the 
sacred  stake  and  the  dead  chief  who  lies  buried  beneath 
it.  Whatever  grows  or  stands  upon  the  grave  is  sure  to 
share  the  honours  paid  to  the  spirit  that  dwells  within  it. 
Thus  a  snake  or  other  animal  seen  to  glide  out  of  a  tomb 


Si 


THE  TREE  ON  BARROWS. 


141 


i 


is  instantly  taken  by  savages  and  even  by  ^-^U-civilised 
men  as  the  genius  or  representative  of  the  dead  inhabitant. 
But  do  trees  grow  out  of  graves  ?  Undoubtedly,  yes. 
In  the  first  place,  they  may  grow  by  mere  accident,  as  they 
might  grow  anywhere  else;  the  more  so  as  the  soil  in  such 
a  case  has  been  turned  and  laboured.  But  beyond  this,  in 
the  second  place,  it  is  common  all  over  the  world  to  plant 
trees  or  shrubs  over  the  graves  of  relatives  or  tribesmen. 
Though  direct  evidence  on  this  point  is  difficult  to  obtain, 
a  little  is  forthcoming.  In  Algeria,  I  observed,  the  Arab 
women  went  on  Fridays  to  plant  flowers  and  shrubs  on  the 
graves  of  their  immediate  dead.  I  learned  from  Mr.  R.  L. 
Stevenson  that  similar  plantings  take  place  in  Samoa  and 
Fiji.  The  Tahitians  put  young  casuarinas  on  graves. 
In  Roman  Catholic  countries  the  planting  of  shrubs  in 
cemeteries  takes  place  usually  on  the  jour  des  morts,  a 
custom  which  would  argue  for  it  an  immense  antiquity; 
for  though  it  is  a  point  of  honour  among  Catholics  to  ex- 
plain this  fete  as  of  comparatively  recent  origin,  definitely 
introduced  by  a  particular  saint  at  a  particular  period,  its 
analogy  to  similar  celebrations  elsewhere  shows  us  that  it 
is  really  a  surviving  relic  of  a  very  ancient  form  of  Manes- 
worship.  In  Graeco-Roman  antiquity  it  is  certain  that 
trees  were  frequently  planted  around  the  barrows  of  the 
dead;  and  that  leafy  branches  formed  part  of  the  estab- 
lished ceremonial  of  funerals.  I  cannot  do  better  than 
quote  in  this  respect  once  more  the  case  of  Polydorus: 

Ergo  instauramus  Polydoro  funus,  et  ingens 
Aggeritur  tumulo  tellus  ;  stant  Manibus  arae, 
Caeruleis  moestae  vittis  atraque  cupresso. 

Suetonius  again  tells  us  how  the  tumulus  of  the  divine 
Augustus  was  carefully  planted;  and  the  manner  in  which 
he  notes  the  fact  seems  to  me  to  argue  that  some  special 
importance  was  attached  to  the  ceremony.  The  acacia  is 
one  of  the  most  sacred  trees  of  Egypt  ;  and  Egyptian 
monuments,  with  their  usual  frankness,  show  us  a  sarco- 


i'    ':'.■   i 


I  I  ■ 


:    ■ 


u 


i 


VA  I 


l^f'^ 


hi 


fi 


"ni 


142 


SACRED  TREES. 


phagus  from  which  an  acacia  emerges,  with  the  naive 
motto,  "  Osiris  springs  forth." 

An  incident  which  occurred  during  the  recent  Sino- 
Japanese  war  shows  how  easily  points  of  this  sort  may  be 
overlooked  by  hasty  writers  in  formal  descriptions.  One 
of  thf*  London  illustrated  papers  printed  an  account  of  the 
burial  of  the  Japanese  dead  at  Port  Arthur,  and  after  men- 
tioning the  simple  headstone  erected  at  each  grave  volun- 
teered the  further  statement  that  nothing  else  marked 
the  place  of  interment.  But  the  engraving  which  accom- 
panied it,  taken  from  a  photograph,  showed  on  the  con- 
trary that  a  little  tree  had  also  been  planted  on  each  tiny 
tumulus. 

I  learn  from  Mr.  William  Simpson  that  the  Tombs  of 
the  Kings  near  Pekin  are  conspicuous  from  afar  by  their 
lofty  groves  of  pine  trees. 

Evergreens,  I  believe,  are  specially  planted  upon  graves 
or  tumuli  because  they  retain  their  greenness  throughout 
the  entire  winter,  and  thus  as  it  were  give  continuous  evi- 
dence of  the  vitality  and  activity  of  the  indwelling  spirit. 
Mr.  Frazer  has  shown  in  The  Golden  Bough  that  mistletoe 
similarly  owes  its  special  sanctity  to  the  fact  that  it  visibly 
holds  the  soul  of  the  tree  uninjured  in  itself,  while  all  the 
surrounding  branches  stand  bare  and  lifeless.  Accord- 
ingly, tumuli  are  very  frequently  crowned  by  evergreens. 
Almost  all  the  round  barrows  in  southern  England,  for 
example,  are  topped  by  very  ancient  Scotch  firs;  and  as  the 
Scotch  fir  is  not  an  indigenous  tree  south  of  the  Tweed, 
it  is  practically  certain  that  these  old  pines  are  the  descen- 
dants of  ancestors  put  in  by  human  hands  when  the  bar- 
rows were  first  raised  over  the  cremated  and  buried  bodies 
of  prehistoric  chieftains.  In  short,  the  Scotch  fir  is  in 
England  the  sacred  tree  of  the  barrows.  As  a  rule,  how- 
ever, in  Northern  Europe,  the  yew  is  the  species  specially 
planted  in  graveyards,  and  several  such  yews  in  various 
parts  of  England  and  Germany  are  held  to  possess  a 
peculiar  sanctity.     The  great  clump  of  very  ancient  y  ^ws 


M 


OFFERINGS  TO  TREES. 


143 


i   -I 


in  Norbury  Park  near  Dorking,  known  as  the  Druids' 
Grove,  has  long  been  considered  a  holy  wood  of  remote 
antiquity.  In  southern  Europe,  the  cypress  replaces  the 
yew  as  the  evergreen  most  closely  connected  with  tombs 
and  cemeteries.  In  Provence  and  Italy,  however,  the  ever- 
green holme-oak  is  almost  equally  a  conventional  denizen 
of  places  of  interment.  M.  Lajard  in  his  able  essay  Sur  le 
Culte  du  Cypres  has  brought  together  much  evidence  of 
this  worship  of  evergreens,  among  the  Greeks,  Etruscans, 
Romans,  Phoenicians,  Arabs,  Persians,  Hindus,  Chinese, 
and  American  nations. 

Sacred  trees,  especially  when  standing  alone,  are  treated 
in  many  respects  with  the  same  ceremonial  as  is  employed 
towards  dead  bodies,  mummies,  graves,   sacred  stones, 
sacred  stakes,  and  carved  idols  or  statues.      In  other 
words,  the  offerings  to  the  ghost  or  god  may  be  made  to 
the  tree  that  grows  on  the  grave  just  as  well  as  to  any 
other  of  the  recognised  embodiments  of  the  indwelling 
spirit.     Darwin  in  the  Voyage  of  the  Beagle  describes  how 
the  Indians  of  South  America  would  greet  with  loud 
shouts  some  sacred  tree,  standing  solitary  on  some  high 
part  of  the  Pampas;  libations  of  brandy  and  mate  were 
poured  into  a  hole  at  its  base  to  gratify  the  soul  of  the  deity 
who  dwelt  there.     One  of  these  tree-gods  had  a  name, 
Walleechu.     The  Congo  people,  again,  put  calabashes  of 
palm-wine  at  the  foot  of  "  trees  treated  as  idols."    In  other 
cases,  blood  is  smeared  on  the  tree;  or  oil  is  offered  to  it. 
Mr.  Duff  Macdonald's  Central  Africans  kill  chickens  at 
the  foot  of  the  "  prayer  tree,"  and  let  its  blood  trickle 
down  to  the  roots.     Oldfield  saw  at  Addacoodah  fowls  and 
many  other  articles  of  food  suspended  as  offerings  to  a 
gigantic  tree.     Sir  WilHam  Hunter  mentions  that  once  a 
year  at  Beerbhoom  the  Santals  "  make  simple  offerings 
to  a  ghost  who  dwells  in  a  Bela  tree."     In  Tonga,  the 
natives  lay  presents  of  food  at  the  foot  of  particular  trees 
which  they  believe  to  be  inhabited  by  spirits.     I  need  not 


;y:  1 


T' 


144 


SACRED  TREES. 


(,( 


if 


.111  > 


multiply  instances;  they  may  be  found  by  the  hundred  in 
Dr.  Tylor  and  other  great  anthropological  collections. 

Furthermore,  the  sacred  tree  is  found  in  the  closest  pos- 
sible connection  with  the  other  indubitably  ancestral 
monuments,  the  sacred  stone  and  the  idol.  "  A  Bengal 
village,"  says  Sir  William  Hunter,  "  has  usually  its  local 
god,  which  it  adores  either  in  the  form  of  a  rude  unhewn 
stone,  or  a  stump,  or  a  tree  marked  with  red  lead  " ;  the 
last  being  probably  a  substitute  for  the  blood  of  human  or 
animal  victims  with  which  it  was  once  watered.  "  Some- 
times a  lump  of  clay  placed  under  a  tree  does  duty  for  a 
deity;  and  the  attendant  priest,  when  there  is  one,  gene- 
rally belongs  to  one  of  the  half-Hinduised  low  castes.  The 
rude  stone  represents  the  non- Aryan  fetish;  and  the  tree 
seems  to  owe  its  sanctity  to  the  non-Aryan  belief  that  it 
forms  the  abode  of  the  ghosts  or  gods  of  the  village." 
That  is  to  say,  we  have  here  ancestor-worship  in  its  undis- 
guised early  native  development. 

I  may  mention  here  in  brief  that,  as  we  shall  hereafter 
see,  this  triple  combination  of  stone,  log,  and  tree  forms 
almost  the  normal  or  invariable  composition  of  the  primi- 
tive shrine  the  whole  world  over. 

The  association  of  the  sacred  tree  with  actual  idols  or 
images  of  deceased  ancestors  is  well  seen  in  the  following 
passage  which  I  quote  from  Dr.  Tylor  :  "  A  clump  of 
larches  on  a  Siberian  steppe,  a  grove  in  the  recesses  of  a 
forest,  is  the  sanctuary  of  a  Turanian  tribe.  Gaily-decked 
idols  in  their  warm  fur  coats,  each  set  up  beneath  its  great 
tree  swathed  with  cloth  or  tinplate,  endless  reindeer-hides 
and  peltry  hanging  to  the  trees  around,  kettles  and  spoons 
and  snufif-horns  and  household  valuables  strewn  as  offer- 
ings before  the  gods — such  is  the  description  of  a  Siberian 
holy  grove,  at  the  stage  when  the  contact  of  foreign  civi- 
lisation has  begun  by  ornamenting  the  rude  old  cere- 
monial it  must  end  by  abolishing.  A  race  ethnologically 
allied  to  these  tribes,  though  risen  to  higher  culture,  kept 
up  remarkable  relics  of  tree-worship  in  Northern  Europe. 


.  lii 


1 


THE  TREE  AND   THE  STONE. 


145 


In  Esthonian  districts,  within  the  present  century,  the 
traveller  might  often  see  the  sacred  tree,  generally  an 
ancient  lime,  oak,  or  ash,  standing  inviolate  in  a  sheltered 
spot  near  the  dwelling-house  ;  and  the  old  memories  are 
handed  down  of  the  time  when  the  first  blood  of  a 
slaughtered  beast  was  sprinkled  on  its  roots,  that  the  cattle 
might  prosper,  or  when  an  offering  was  laid  beneath  the 
holy  linden,  on  the  stone  where  the  worshipper  knelt  on 
his  bare  knees,  moving  from  east  to  west  and  back,  which 
stone  he  kissed  when  he  had  said,  *  Receive  the  food  as  an 
offering.'  "  After  the  evidence  already  given,  I  do  not 
think  there  can  be  a  reasonable  doubt,  in  such  a  combina- 
tion of  tree  and  stone,  that  we  have  here  a  sacrifice  to  an 
ancestral  spirit. 

Similarly,  in  the  courtyard  of  a  Bodo  house  is  planted 
the  sacred  euphorbia  of  Batho,  the  national  god,  to  which 
a  priest  offers  prayer  and  kills  a  pig.  In  the  island  of 
Tjumba,  in  the  East  Indies,  a  festival  is  held  after  harvest, 
and  vessels  are  filled  with  rice  as  a  thank-offering  to  the 
gods.  Then  the  sacred  stone  at  the  foot  of  a  palm  tree  is 
sprinkled  with  the  blood  of  a  sacrificed  animal,  and  rice  is 
laid  on  the  stone  for  the  gods.  When  the  Khonds  settle 
a  new  village,  a  sacred  cotton  tree  must  be  planted  with 
solemn  rites,  and  beneath  it  is  placed  the  sacrificial  stone 
which  embodies  or  represents  the  village  deity.  Among 
the  Semites,  says  Professor  Robertson  Smith,  "  no 
Canaanite  high  place  was  complete  without  its  sacred 
tree  standing  beside  the  altar."  We  shall  only  fully  under- 
stand the  importance  of  these  facts,  however,  when  we 
come  later  to  consider  the  subject  of  the  manufacture  of 
gods  by  deliberate  process,  and  the  nature  of  the  bloody 
ceremonial  which  always  accompanies  it. 

In  some  of  the  above  instances  it  is  incidentally  men- 
tioned that  the  trunks  of  sacred  trees  are  occasionally 
draped,  as  we  saw  to  be  also  the  case  with  sacred  stones, 
sacred  stakes,  idols,  and  relics.  Another  example  of  this 
practice  is  given  in  the  account  of  the  holy  oak  of  Romowe, 


in 


It 


m 


146 


SACRED  TREES. 


\l:i 


venerated  by  the  ancient  Prussians,  which  was  hung  with 
drapery  Hke  the  ashera,  and  decked  with  Httle  hanging 
images  of  the  gods.  The  holy  trees  of  Ireland  are  still 
covered  with  rag  offerings.  Other  cases  will  be  noticed 
in  other  connexions  hereafter. 

Once  more,  just  as  stones  come  to  be  regarded  as  ances- 
tors, so  by  a  like  process  do  sacred  trees.  Thus  Galton 
says  in  South  Africa,  '*  We  passed  a  magnificent  tree.  It 
was  the  parent  of  all  the  Damaras.  .  .  .  The  savages 
danced  round  it  in  great  delight."  Several  Indian  tribes 
believe  themselves  to  be  the  sons  of  trees.  Many  other 
cases  are  noted  by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  and  Dr.  Tylor. 
I  do  not  think  it  is  necessary  for  our  argument  to  repeat 
them  here.  Sometimes,  however,  especially  in  later 
rationalising  times,  the  sacred  tree  is  merely  said  to  have 
been  planted  by  the  god  or  hero  whom  it  commemorates. 
Thus  the  cypresses  of  Herakles  at  Daphne  were  believed 
to  have  been  set  on  the  spot  by  that  deity,  while  the 
tamarisk  at  Beersheba  was  supposed  to  have  been  placed 
there  by  Abraham. 

I  hope  it  is  clear  from  this  rapid  resume  that  all  the  facts 
about  the  worship  of  sacred  trees  stand  exactly  parallel 
to  those  with  regard  to  the  worship  of  graves,  mummies, 
idols,  sacred  stones,  sacred  stakes,  and  other  signs  of  de- 
parted spirits.  Indeed,  we  have  sometimes  direct  evidence 
of  such  affiliation.  Thus  Mr.  Turner  says  of  a  sacred  tree 
on  a  certain  spot  in  the  island  of  Savaii,  which  enjoyed 
rights  of  sanctuary  like  the  cities  of  refuge  or  a  mediaeval 
cathedral  :  "  It  is  said  that  the  king  of  a  division  of  Upolu, 
called  Atua,  once  lived  at  that  spot.  After  he  died,  the 
house  fell  into  decay  ;  but  the  tree  was  fixed  on  as  repre- 
senting the  departed  king,  and  out  of  respect  for  his 
memory  it  was  made  the  substitute  of  a  living  and  royal 
protector."  By  the  light  of  this  remark  we  may  surely 
interpret  in  a  similar  sense  such  other  statements  of  Mr. 
Turner's  as  that  a  sweet-scented  tree  in  another  place  "  was 
held  to  be  the  habitat  of  a  household  god,  and  anything^ 


. 


FAMILY   TREES. 


M7 


aromatic  which  the  family  happened  to  get  was  presented 
to  it  as  an  offering;"  or  again,  **a  family  god  was  supposed 
to  live  "  in  another  tree  ;  "  and  hence  no  one  dared  to 
pluck  a  leaf  or  break  a  branch."  For  family  gods,  as  we 
saw  in  a  previous  chapter,  are  really  family  ghosts,  pro- 
moted to  be  deities. 

In  modern  accounts  of  sacred  trees  much  stress  is 
usually  laid  upon  the  fact  that  they  are  large  and  well- 
grown,  often  very  conspicuous,  and  occupying  a  height, 
where  they  serve  as  landmarks.  Hence  it  has  frequently 
been  taken  for  granted  that  they  have  been  selected  for 
worship  on  account  of  their  size  and  commanding  posi- 
tion. This,  however,  I  think,  is  a  case  of  putting  the  cart 
before  the  horse,  as  though  one  were  to  say  that  St.  Peter's 
and  Westminster  Abbey,  the  Temple  of  Karnak  or  the 
Mosque  of  Omar,  owed  their  sanctity  to  their  imposing 
dimensions.  There  is  every  reason  why  a  sacred  tree 
should  grow  to  be  exceptionally  large  and  conspicuous. 
Barrows  are  usually  built  on  more  or  less  commanding 
heights,  where  they  may  attract  general  attention.  The 
ground  is  laboured,  piled  high,  freed  from  weeds,  and  en- 
riched by  blood  and  other  offerings.  The  tree,  l)eing 
sacred,  is  tended  and  cared  for.  It  is  never  cut  down,  and 
so  naturally  on  the  average  of  instances  grows  to  be  a  big 
and  well-developed  specimen.  Hence  I  hold  the  tree  is 
usually  big  because  it  is  sacred,  not  sacred  because  it  is  big. 
On  the  other  hand,  where  a  tree  already  full-grown  is 
chosen  for  a  place  of  burial,  it  would  no  doubt  be  natural 
to  choose  a  large  and  conspicuous  one.  Thus  I  read  of 
the  tree  under  which  Dr.  Livingstone's  heart  was  buried 
by  his  native  servant,  "  It  is  the  largest  in  the  neighbour- 
hood." 

Looking  at  the  question  broadly,  the  case  stands  thus. 
We  know  that  in  many  instances  savages  inter  their  dead 
under  the  shade  of  big  trees.  We  know  that  such  trees 
are  thereafter  considered  sacred,  and  worshipped  with 
blood,  clothes,  drapery,  offerings,     We  know  that  young 


m 


It.  /j. 


i' 


il'J 


n 


III 

1(1  :  .■ 


1i 


i        ! 


^)^!l 


148 


SACRED   TREES. 


shrubs  or  trees  are  frequently  planted  on  graves  in  all 
countries.  We  know  that  whatever  comes  up  on  or  out  of 
a  grave  is  counted  as  representative  of  the  ghost  within  it. 
The  presumption  is  therefore  in  favour  of  any  particular 
sacred  tree  being  of  funereal  origin  ;  and  the  onus  of  prov- 
ing the  opposite  lies  with  the  person  who  asserts  some 
more  occult  and  less  obvious  explanation. 

At  the  same  time  I  am  quite  ready  to  allow  here,  as  in 
previous  instances,  when  once  the  idea  of  certain  trees 
being  sacred  has  grown  common  among  men,  many  trees 
may  come  to  possess  by  pure  association  a  sanctity  of  their 
own.  This  is  doubtless  the  case  in  India  with  the  peepul, 
and  in  various  other  countries  with  various  other  trees. 
Exactly  the  same  thing  has  happened  to  stones.  And  so, 
again,  though  I  believe  the  temple  to  have  been  developed 
out  of  the  tomb  or  its  covering,  I  do  not  deny  that 
churches  are  now  built  apart  from  tombs,  though  al- 
ways dedicated  to  the  worship  of  a  God  who  is  demonstra- 
bly a  particular  deified  personage. 

Another  point  011  which  I  must  touch  briefly  is  that  of 
the  jacred  grove  or  clustei  of  treos.  These  often  repre- 
sent, I  take  '.t,  the  trees  planted  in  the  temenos  or  sacred 
tabooed  space  which  surrounds  the  primitive  tomb  or 
temple.  The  kouhbus  or  little  dome-shaped  tombs  of 
Mahommedan  saints  so  common  in  North  Africa  are  all 
surrounded  by  such  a  walled  enclosure,  within  which  orna- 
mental or  other  trees  are  habitually  planted.  In  many 
cases  these  are  palms — the  familiar  sacred  tree  of  Meso- 
potamia, about  which  more  must  be  said  hereafter  in  a 
later  chapter.  The  well-known  bois  sacre  at  Blidah  is  a 
considerable  grove,  with  a  koubba  in  its  midst.  A  similar 
temenos  frequently  surrounded  thr  Egyptian  and  the  Greek 
temple.  I  do  not  assert  that  these  were  always  of  neces- 
sity act^ial  tombs  ;  but  the>*'  were  at  any  rate  cenotaphs. 
When  once  people  had  got  accustomed  to  the  idea  that 
certain  trees  were  sacred  to  the  memory  of  their  ancestors 
or  their  gods,  it  would  be  but  a  slight  step  to  plant  such 


SEMITIC  TREE-WORSHIF. 


149 


trees  round  an  empty  temple.  When  Xenophon,  for  ex- 
ample, built  a  shrine  to  Artemis,  and  planted  around  it 
a  grove  of  many  kinds  of  fruit  trees,  and  placed  in  it  an 
altar  and  an  image  of  the  goddess,  nobody  would  for  a 
moment  suppose  he  erected  it  over  the  body  of  an  actual 
dead  Artemis.  But  men  would  never  have  begun  building 
temples  and  consecrating  groves  at  all  if  they  had  not 
first  built  houses  for  the  dead  god-chief,  and  planted  shrubs 
and  trees  upon  his  venerated  tumulus.  Nay,  even  the 
naive  inscription  upon  Xenophon's  shrine — **  He  who 
lives  here  and  enjoys  the  fruits  of  the  ground  must  every 
year  offer  the  tenth  part  of  the  produce  to  the  goddess, 
and  out  of  the  residue  keep  the  temple  in  repair" — does  it 
not  carry  us  back  implicitly  to  the  origin  of  priesthood, 
and  of  the  desire  for  perpetuity  in  the  due  maintenance 
of  the  religious  ofifices  ? 

I  shall  say  nothing  here  about  the  evolution  of  the  great 
civilised  tree-gods  like  Attis  and  Adonis,  so  common  in 
the  region  of  the  eastern  Mediterranean,  partly  because  I 
have  already  treated  them  at  some  length  in  the  essay  on 
Tree- Worship  to  which  I  have  alluded  above,  and  partly 
because  they  would  lead  us  too  far  afield  from  our  present 
subject.  But  a  few  words  must  be  devoted  in  passing 
to  the  prevalence  of  tree-worship  among  the  Semitic  peo- 
ples, intimately  connected  as  it  is  with  the  rise  of  certain 
important  elements  in  the  Christian  cult. 

"  In  all  parts  of  the  Semitic  area,"  says  Professor  Ro- 
bertson Smith,  "  trees  were  adored  as  divine."  Among 
the  species  thus  honoured  he  enumerates  especially  the 
pines  and  cedars  of  Lebanon,  the  evergreen  oaks  of  the 
Palestinian  hills,  the  tamarisks  of  the  Syrian  jungles,  and 
the  acacias  of  the  Arabian  wadies.  Most  of  these,  it  will 
be  noted,  are  evergreens.  In  Arabia,  the  most  striking 
case  on  record  is  that  of  the  sacred  date-palm  at  Nejran. 
This  was  adored  at  an  annual  feast,  when  it  was  "  all  hung 
with  fine  clothes  and  women's  ornaments."  A  similar 
tree  existed  at  Mecca,  to  which  the  people  resorted  annu- 


It 


I 


-J.ui,l  .UJIW 


■H 


til 


I  i 


"  I 


I 


i' 


I 


150 


SACRED   TREES. 


ally,  and  hung  upon  it  weapons,  garments,  ostrich  eggs, 
and  other  offerings.  In  a  sacred  acacia  at  Nakla  a  god- 
dess was  supposed  to  live.  The  modern  Arabs  still  hang 
pieces  of  flesh  on  such  sacred  trees,  horiour  them  with 
sacrifices,  and  present  them  with  rags  of  calico  and 
coloured  beads. 

As  regards  the  Phoenicians  and  Canaanites,  Philo 
Byblius  says  that  plants  were  in  anc.  ent  times  revered  as 
gods,  and  honoured  with  libations  and  sacrifices.  Dr. 
Robertson  Smith  gives  several  instances.  Christianity  has 
not  extinguished  the  veneration  for  sacred  trees  in  Syria, 
where  they  are  still  prayed  to  in  sickness  and  hung  with 
rags.  The  Moslems  cf  Palestine  also  venerate  the  sacred 
trees  of  immemorial  antiquity. 

In  the  Hebrew  scriptures  tree-worship  constantly  ap- 
pears, and  is  frankly  dwelt  with  by  Professor  Robertson 
Smith,  who  does  not  refuse  to  connect  with  thi?  set  of  be- 
liefs the  legend  of  Jahweh  in  the  burning  bush.  The  local 
altars  of  early  Hebrew  cult  were  habitually  set  up  "  under 
green  trees."  On  this  subject  I  would  refer  the  reader  to 
Dr.  Smith's  own  interesting  disquisition  on  p.  193  of 
The  Religion  of  the  Semites. 

With  regard  to  the  general  sacredness  of  vegetation,  and 
especially  of  food-plants,  such  as  corn,  the  vine,  and  the 
date-palm,  I  postpone  that  important  subject  for  the  pre- 
sent, till  we  come  to  consider  the  gods  of  cultivation,  and 
the  curious  set  of  ideas  which  gradually  led  up  to  sacra- 
mental god-eating.  In  a  theme  so  vast  and  so  involved 
as  that  of  human  religion,  it  becomes  necessary  to  take 
one  point  at  a  time,  and  to  deal  with  the  various  parts  in 
analytic  isolation. 

We  have  now  examined  briefly  almost  all  the  principal 
sacred  objects  of  the  world,  according  to  classes — the 
corpse,  the  mummy,  the  idol,  the  sacred  stone,  the  sacred 
stake,  the  sacred  tree  or  grove  ;  there  remains  but  one 
other  group  of  holy  things,  very  generally  recognised, 
which  I  do  not  propose  to  examine  separately,  but  to 


) 


i. 


\ 


SACRED  WELLS. 


151 


I 


which  a  few  words  may  yet  be  devoted  at  the  end  of  a 
chapter.  I  mean,  the  sacred  wells.  It  might  seem  at  first 
sight  as  if  these  could  have  no  possible  connection  with 
death  or  burial  ;  but.  that  expectation  is,  strange  to  say, 
delusive.  There  appears  to  be  some  reason  for  bringing 
wells,  too,  into  the  widening  category  of  funereal  objects. 
The  oxen's  well  at  Acre,  for  example,  was  visited  by  Chris- 
tian, Jewish,  and  Moslem  pilgrims  ;  it  was  therefore  an 
object  of  great  ancient  sanctity  ;  but  observe  this  point  : 
there  is  a  mashhed  or  sacred  tomb  beside  it,  "  perhaps  the 
modern  representative  of  the  ancient  Memnonium." 
Every  Egyptian  temple  had  in  like  manner  its  sacred  lake. 
In  modern  Syria,  "  cisterns  are  always  found  beside  the 
grave  of  saints,  and  are  believed  to  be  inhabited  by  a  sort 
of  fairy.  A  pining  child  is  thought  to  be  a  fairy  change- 
Hng,  and  must  be  lowered  into  the  cistern."  The  simi- 
larity of  the  belief  about  holy  wells  in  England  and  Ire- 
land, and  their  frequent  association  with  the  name  of  a 
saint,  would  seem  to  suggest  for  them  a  like  origin. 
Sacred  rivers  usually  rise  from  sacred  springs,  near  which 
stands  a  temple.  The  river  Adonis  took  its  origin  at  the 
shrine  of  Aphaca  :  and  the  grave  of  Adonis,  about  whom 
much  more  must  be  said  hereafter,  stood  near  the  mouth 
of  the  holy  stream  that  was  reddened  by  his  blood.  The 
sacred  river  Belus  had  also  its  peculiar  Memnonium  or 
Adonis  tomb.  But  I  must  add  that  sacred  rivers  had  like- 
wise their  annual  god-victims,  about  whom  we  shall  have  a 
great  deal  to  say  at  a  later  stage  of  our  enquiry,  and  from 
whom  in  part  they  probably  derived  their  sanctity.  Still, 
that  their  holiness  was  also  due  in  part,  and  originally,  to 
tombs  at  their  sources,  I  think  admits  of  no  reasonable 
doubt. 

The  equivalence  of  the  holy  well  and  the  holy  stone  is 
shown  by  the  fact  that  while  a  woman  whose  chastity  was 
suspected  had  to  drink  water  of  a  sacred  spring  to  prove 
her  innocence,  at  Mecca  she  had  to  swear  seventy  oaths 
by  the  Kaaba. 


>  1 


1 


mmmmmmmm 


f,ii 


.■■  i 


'k 


f :      I 
id' 


152 


SACRED  TREES. 


Again,  sacred  wells  and  fountains  were  and  are  wor- 
shipped with  just  the  same  acts  of  sacrifice  as  ghosts  and 
images.  At  Aphaca,  the  pilgrims  cast  into  the  holy  pool 
jewels  of  gold  and  silver,  with  webs  of  linen  and  other 
precious  stuffs.  A  holy  grove  was  an  adjunct  of  the  holy 
spring  :  in  Greece,  according  to  Botticher,  they  were  sel- 
dom separated.  At  the  annual  fair  of  the  Sacred  Tere- 
binth, or  tree  and  well  of  Abraham  at  Mamre,  the  heathen 
visitors  Oifered  sacrifices  beside  the  tree,  and  cast  into  the 
well  lib?  dons  of  wine,  with  cakes,  coins,  myrrh,  and  in- 
cense :  all  of  which  we  may  compare  with  the  Ostyak  of- 
ferings to  ancestral  grave-stakes.  At  the  holy  waters  of 
Karwa,  bread,  fruit,  and  other  foods  were  laid  beside  the 
fountain.  At  Mecca,  and  at  the  Stygian  Waters  in  the 
Syrian  desert,  similar  gifts  were  cast  into  the  holy  source. 
In  one  of  these  instances  at  least  we  know  that  the  holy 
well  was  associated  with  an  actual  burial  ;  for  at  Aphaca, 
the  holiest  shrine  of  Syria,  the  tomb  of  the  local  Baal  or 
god  was  shown  beside  the  sacred  fountain.  "  A  buried 
god,"  says  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  quaintly,  in  commenting 
on  this  fact,  "  is  a  god  that  dwells  under  ground."  It 
would  be  far  truer  and  more  philosophical  to  say  that  a 
god  who  dwells  underground  is  a  buried  man. 

I  need  not  recall  the  offerings  to  Cornish  and  Irish  well- 
spirits,  which  have  now  degenerated  for  the  most  part  into 
pins  and  needles. 

On  the  whole,  though  it  is  impossible  to  understand  the 
entire  genesis  of  sacred  founts  and  rivers  without  previous 
consideration  of  deliberate  god-making,  a  subject  which  I 
reserve  for  a  later  portion  of  our  exposition,  I  do  not  think 
we  shall  go  far  wrong  in  supposing  that  the  sacred  well 
most  often  occurs  in  company  with  the  sacred  tree,  the 
sacred  stone  or  altar,  and  the  sacred  tomb  ;  and  that  it 
owes  its  sanctity  in  the  last  resort,  originally  at  least,  to 
a  burial  by  its  side  ;  though  I  do  not  doubt  that  this 
sanctity  was  in  many  cases  kept  up  by  the  annual  immo- 
lation of  a  fresh  victim-god,  of  a  type  whose  genesis  will 


THEIR  CONNEXION  W^'^H  THE  DEAD. 


153 


I 


hereafter  detain  us.  Indeed,  '^)r.  Robertson  Smith  says  of 
the  Semitic  worship  in  gener  iJ,  "  The  usual  natural  sym- 
bols are  a  fountain  or  a  t.  :e,  while  the  ordinary  artificial 
symbol  is  a  pillar  or  pile  of  stones  :  but  very  often  all  three 
are  found  together,  and  this  was  the  rule  in  the  more  de- 
veloped sanctuaries."  I  cannot  agree  with  him  on  the 
point  of  "  symbolism  "  :  but  the  collocation  of  objects  is 
at  least  significant. 

Thus,  in  ultimate  analysis,  we  see  that  all  the  sacred  ob- 
jects of  the  world  are  either  dead  men  themselves,  as 
corpse,  mummy,  ghost,  or  god  ;  or  else  the  tomb  where 
such  men  are  buried  ;  or  else  the  temple,  shrine,  or  hut 
which  covers  the  tomb  ;  or  else  the  tombstone,  altar, 
image,  or  statue,  standing  over  it  and  representing  the 
ghost  ;  or  else  the  stake,  idol,  or  household  god  which  is 
fashioned  as  their  deputy  ;  or  else  the  tree  which  grows 
above  the  barrow  ;  or  else  the  well,  or  tank,  or  spring, 
natural  or  artificial,  by  whose  side  the  dead  man  has  been 
laid  to  rest.  In  one  form  or  another,  from  beginning  to 
end,  we  find  only,  in  Mr.  William  Simpson's  graphic 
phrase,  "  the  Worship  of  Death,"  as  the  basis  and  root  of 
all  human  religion. 


il 


r 


■i:        I 


^ 


154 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


I   / 


ii  I 


P, 


V' 


i|i 


We  have  now  completed  our  preliminary  survey  of  the 
nature  and  origin  of  Gods  in  general.  We  have  seen  how 
men  first  came  to  believe  in  the  objective  existence  of 
these  powerful  and  invisible  beings,  how  they  learnt  to 
invest  them  with  majestic  attributes,  and  how  they  grew 
to  worship  them  under  the  various  forms  of  mummies  or 
boulders,  stone  or  wooden  idols,  trees  or  stumps,  wells, 
rivers,  and  fountains.  In  short,  we  have  briefly  arrived 
at  the  origin  of  Polytheism.  We  have  now  to  go  on  to 
our  second  question — How  from  the  belief  in  many  gods 
did  men  progress  to  the  belief  in  one  single  God,  the 
creator  and  upholder  of  all  things  ?  Our  task  is  now  to 
reconstruct  the  origin  of  Monotheism. 

But  Monotheism  bases  itself  entirely  upon  the  great 
God  of  the  Hebrews.  To  him,  therefore,  we  must  next 
address  ourselves.  Is  he  too  resoluble,  as  I  hinted  be- 
fore, into  a  Sacred  Stone,  the  monument  and  representa- 
tive of  some  prehistoric  chieftain  ?  Can  we  trace  the 
origin  of  the  Deity  of  Christendom  till  we  find  him  at  last 
in  a  forgotten  Semitic  ghost  of  the  earliest  period  ? 

The  chief  Hebrew  god  Jahweh,  when  we  first  catch  a 
passing  glimpse  of  his  primitive  worship  by  his  own  peo- 
ple, was  but  one  among  a  number  of  competing  deities, 
mostly,  it  would  appear,  embodied  by  their  votaries  in  the 
visible  form  of  stone  or  wooden  pillars,  and  adored  by  a 
small  group  of  loosely-connected  tribes  among  the  moun- 
tain region  in  the  southwest  of  Syria.     The  confederacy 


ISRAEL  IN  EGYPT. 


155 


among  whom  he  dwelt  knew  themselves  as  the  Sons  of 
Israel  ;  they  regarded  Jahweh  as  their  principal  god,  much 
as  the  Greeks  did  Zeus,  or  the  early  Teutons  their  national 
hero  Woden.  But  a  universal  tradition  among  them  bore 
witness  to  the  fact  that  they  had  once  lived  in  a  subject 
condition  in  Egypt,  the  house  of  bondage,  and  that  their 
god  Jahweh  had  been  instrumental  in  leading  them  thence 
into  the  rugged  land  they  inhabited  throughout  the  whole 
historical  period,  between  the  valley  of  Jordan  and  the 
Mediterranean  coast.  So  consistent  and  so  definite  was 
this  traditional  belief  that  we  can  hardly  regard  it  other- 
wise than  as  enclosing  a  kernel  of  truth  ;  and  not  only  do 
Kuenen  and  other  Semitic  scholars  of  the  present  day 
admit  it  as  genuine,  but  the  Egyptologists  also  seem  gen- 
erally to  allow  its  substantial  accuracy  and  full  accord  with 
hieroglyphic  literature.  This  sojourn  in  Egypt  cannot 
have  failed  to  influence  to  some  extent  the  Semitic  stran- 
gers :  therefore  I  shall  begin  my  quest  of  the  Hebrew  god 
among  the  Egyptian  monuments.  Admitting  that  he  was 
essentially  in  all  respects  a  deity  of  the  true  Semitic  pat- 
tern, I  think  it  will  do  us  good  to  learn  a  little  beforehand 
about  the  people  among  whom  his  votaries  dwelt  so  long, 
especially  as  the  history  of  the  Egyptian  cults  affords  us 
perhaps  the  best  historical  example  of  the  growth  and  de- 
velopment of  a  great  national  religion. 

A  peculiar  interest,  indeed,  attaches  in  the  history  of 
the  human  mind  to  the  evolution  of  the  gods  of  Egypt. 
Nowhere  else  in  the  world  can  we  trace  so  well  such  a  con- 
tinuous development  from  the  very  simplest  beginnings 
of  religious  ideas  to  the  very  highest  planes  of  mysticism 
and  philosophic  theology.  There  are  savage  cults,  it  is 
true,  which  show  us  more  clearly  the  earliest  stages  in  the 
process  whereby  the  simple  ancestral  ghost  passes  im- 
perceptibly into  the  more  powerful  form  of  a  supernatural 
deity  :  there  are  elevated  civilised  creeds  which  show  us 
more  grandly  in  its  evolved  shape  the  final  conception  of  a 
single  supreme  Ruler  of  the  Cosmos.     But  there  is  no 


■'I 


1 


f 


U   .' 


,J 


•l;i^' 


!•■» 


p  ■ 

111 .  ,|i 

M  -■«  i| 

' 

m 

■ 

i 

156 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


other  religious  system  known  to  us  in  which  we  can  follow 
so  readily,  without  a  single  break,  the  whole  evolutionary 
movement  whereby  the  earlier  ideas  get  gradually  ex- 
panded and  etherealised  into  the  later.  The  origin  of  the 
other  great  historical  religions  is  lost  from  our  eyes  among 
dim  mists  of  fable  :  in  Egypt  alone,  of  all  civilised  coun- 
tries, does  our  record  go  back  to  the  remote  period  when 
the  religious  conception  was  still  at  the  common  savage 
level,  and  follow  it  forward  continuously  to  the  advanced 
point  where  it  had  all  but  achieved,  '.n  I<^s  syncretic  move- 
ment, the  ultimate  goal  of  pure  monotheism. 

I  would  wish,  however,  to  begin  my  review  of  this  singu- 
lar history  by  saying,  once  for  all,  that  while  I  make  no  pre- 
tensions to  special  Egyptological  knowledge,  I  must  never- 
theless dissent  on  general  anthropological  grounds  from 
the  attitude  taken  up  by  Mr.  Le  Page  Renouf  in  his 
Lectures  on  the  Religion  of  Ancient  Egypt.  That  learned 
writer's  work,  indeed,  is,  scientifically  speaking,  half  a  cen- 
tury behind  its  time.  It  is  written  as  though  the  doctrine 
of  evolution  had  never  been  promulgated  ;  and  every  page 
contains  glaring  contradictions  of  the  most  elementary 
principles  of  human  development.  Mr.  Renouf  still  ad- 
heres to  the  discredited  ideas  that  polytheism  grew  out  of 
an  antecedent  monotheism  ;  that  animal-worship  and 
other  low  forms  of  adoration  are  "  symbolical  "  in  origin  ; 
and  that  "  the  sublimer  portions  of  the  Egyptian  religion 
are  not  the  comparatively  late  result  of  a  process  of  de- 
velopment or  elimination  from  the  grosser."  Such  theo- 
ries would  of  themselves  be  extremely  improbable,  even  on 
the  fullest  and  best  evidence  ;  but  the  evidence  which  Mr. 
Renouf  brings  forward  to  support  them  is  of  the  flimsiest 
description.  A  plain  survey  of  the  Egyptian  monuments 
in  the  Nile  valley,  and  of  the  known  facts  about  Egyptian 
religion,  will  lead  any  unbiassed  mind,  free  from  the  warp- 
ing influence  of  preconception,  and  accustomed  to  wide 
anthropological  enquiry,  to  precisely  opposite  and  more 
probable  conclusions.     For  it  must  be  carefully  borne  in 


HI' 


THE   TOMB  AND   THE  MUMMY. 


157 


mind  that  on  these  subjects  the  specialist  is  the  last  man 
whose  opinions  should  be  implicitly  and  unhesitatingly  ac- 
cepted. The  religion  of  Egypt,  like  the  religion  of  Judaea 
or  the  religion  of  Hawaii,  must  be  judged,  not  in  isolation, 
but  by  the  analogies  of  other  religions  elsewhere  ;  the  at- 
tempt to  explain  it  as  an  unrelated  phenomenon,  which 
has  already  been  found  so  disastrous  in  the  ca*^^  of  the 
Semitic  and  the  Aryan  cults,  must  be  abandoned  once  for 
all  by  the  comparative  psychologist  as  a  hopeless  error. 
The  key  to  the  origin  of  the  Egyptian  faith  is  to  be  found, 
not  in  the  late  philosophising  glosses  quoted  by  M.  de 
Rouge  and  his  English  disciple,  but  in  the  simple,  unvary- 
ing, ancestral  creeds  of  existing  African  savages. 

Looked  at  from  this  point  of  view,  then — the  evolution- 
ary point  of  view — nothing  can  be  clearer  than  the  fact 
that  the  early  Egyptian  religion  bases  itself  entirely  upon 
two  main  foundations,  ancestor-worship  and  totemism. 

I  will  begin  with  the  first  of  these,  which  all  analogy 
teaches  us  to  consider  by  far  the  earliest,  and  infinitely 
the  most  important.  And  I  may  add  that  it  is  also,  to 
judge  by  the  Egyptian  evidence  alone,  both  the  element 
which  underlies  the  whole  religious  conceptions  of  the 
Nile  valley,  and  likewise  the  element  which  directly  ac- 
counts, as  we  shall  see  hereafter,  for  all  the  most  impor- 
tant gods  of  the  national  pantheon,  including  Osiris,  Ptah, 
Khem,  and  Amen,  as  well  perhaps  as  many  of  their  cor- 
relative goddesses.  There  is  not,  in  fact,  any  great  ethni- 
cal religion  on  earth,  except  possibly  the  Chinese,  in  which 
the  basal  importance  of  the  Dead  Man  is  so  immediately 
apparent  as  in  the  ancient  cult  of  Pharaohnic  Egypt. 

The  Egyptian  religion  bases  itself  upon  the  tomb.  It 
is  impossible  for  a  moment  to  doubt  that  fact  as  one  stands 
un'ier  the  scanty  shade  of  the  desert  date-palms  among 
the  huge  sun-smitten  dust-heaps  that  represent  the  streets 
of  Thebes  and  Memphis.  The  commonest  object  of 
worship  on  all  the  monuments  of  Nile  is  beyond  doubt 
the  Mummy  :  sometimes  the  private  mummy  of  an  an- 


t 


■ii 


|i 


I 


If 


[;  I 


i':: 


k 


['   ! 


158 


THE  GODS  or  EGYPT. 


cestor  or  kinsman,  sometimes  the  greater  deified  mum- 
mies of  immemorial  antiquity,  blended  in  the  later  syn- 
cretic mysticism  with  the  sun-god  and  other  allegorical 
deities,  but  represented  to  the  very  last  in  all  ages  of  art — 
on  the  shattered  Rameseum  at  Thebes  or  the  Ptolemaic 
pillars  of  still  unshaken  Denderah — as  always  unmistaka- 
ble and  obvious  mummies.  If  ever  there  was  a  country 
where  the  Worship  of  the  Dead  was  pushed  to  an  extreme, 
that  country  was  distinctly  and  decisively  Egypt. 

"  The  oldest  sculptures  show  us  no  acts  of  adoration  or 
of  sacrifice,"  says  Mr.  Loftie,  "  except  those  of  worship  at 
the  shrine  of  a  deceased  ancestor  or  relative."  This  is 
fully  in  keeping  with  what  we  know  of  the  dawn  of  religion 
elsewhere,  and  with  the  immense  importance  always  at- 
tached to  the  preservation  of  the  mummy  intact  through- 
out the  whole  long  course  of  Egyptian  history.  The 
Egyptian,  in  spite  of  his  high  civilisation,  remained  always 
at  the  first  or  corpse-preserving  stage  of  custom  as  re- 
gards the  dead.  To  him,  therefore,  the  life  after  death 
was  far  more  serious  than  the  life  on  earth  :  he  realised  it 
so  fully  that  he  made  endless  preparations  for  it  during  his 
days  above,  and  built  himself  a  tomb  as  an  eternal  man- 
sion. The  grave  was  a  place  of  abode,  v/here  the  mummy 
was  to  pass  the  greater  part  of  his  existence  ;  and  even 
in  the  case  of  private  persons  (like  that  famous  Tih  whose 
painted  sepulchre  at  Sakkarah  every  tourist  to  Cairo 
makes  a  point  of  visiting)  it  was  sumptuously  decorated 
with  painting  and  sculpture.  In  the  mortuary  chambers 
or  chapels  attached  to  the  tombs,  the  relations  of  the  de- 
ceasea  and  the  priests  of  the  cemetery  celebrated  on  cer- 
tain fixed  dates  various  ceremonitG  in  honour  of  the  dead, 
and  oflfered  appropriate  gifts  to  the  mummy  within. 
"  The  tables  of  offerings,  which  no  doubt  formed  part  of 
the  furniture  of  the  chambers,  are  depicted  on  the  walls, 
covered  with  the  gifts  of  meat,  fruits,  bread,  and  wine 
which  had  to  be  presented  in  kind."  These  parentalia  un- 
doubtedly formed  the  main  feature  of  the  practical  re- 


THE   TOMB  A    TEMPLE. 


159 


*[ 


ligion  of  early  Egypt,  as  exhibited  to  us  on  all  the  monu- 
ments except  the  late  tomb-caves  of  royal  personages,  de- 
voted to  the  worship  of  the  equally  mummified  great  gods. 
The  Egyptian  tomb  was  usually  a  survival  of  the  cave 
artificially  imitated.     The  outer  chamber,  in  which  the 
ceremonies  of  the  offertory  took  place,  was  the  only  part 
accessible,  after  the  interment  had  been  completed,  to  the 
feet  of  survivors.     The  mummy  itself,  concealed  in  its 
sarcophagus,  lay  at  the  bottom  of  a  deep  pit  beyond,  by 
the  end  of  a  corridor  often  containing  statues  or  idols  of 
the  deceased.     These  idols,  says  M.  Maspero,  were  indefi- 
nitely multiplied,  in  case  the  mummy  itself  should  be  ac- 
cidentally destroyed,  in  order  that  the  Ka  (the  ghost  or 
double)    might    find    a    safe    dwelling-place.     Compare 
the  numerous  little  images  placed  upon  the  grave  by  the 
Coast  Negroes.     It  was  the  outer  chamber,  however,  that 
sheltered  the  stele  or  pillar  which  bore  the  epitaph,  as  well 
as  the  altar  or  table  for  offerings,  the  smoke  from  which 
was  conveyed  to  the  statues  in  the  corridor  through  a 
small  aperture  in  the  wall  of  partition.     Down  the  well 
beyond,  the  mummy  in  person  reposed,  in  its  eternal  dwel- 
ling-place, free  from  all  chance  of  violation  or  outrage. 
"  The  greatest  importance,"  says  Mr.  Renouf,  "  was  at- 
tached to  the  permanence  of  the  tomb,  to  the  continuance 
of  the  religious  ceremonies,  and  to  the  prayers  of  passers- 
by."     Again,  "  there  is  a  very  common  formula  stating 
that  the  person  who  raised  the  tablet  *  made  it  as  a  memo- 
rial to  his  fathers  who  are  in  the  nether  world,  built  up 
what  he  found  was  imperfect,  and  renewed  what  was  found 
out  of  repair.*  "     In  the  inscription  on  one  of  the  great 
tombs  at  Beni-Hassan  the  founder  says  :  "  I  made  to  flou- 
rish the  name  of  my  father,  and  I  built  chapels  for  his  ka 
[or  ghost].     I  caused  statues  to  be  conveyed  to  the  holy 
dwelling,  and  distributed  to  them  their  offerings  in  pure 
gifts.     I  instituted  the  officiating  priest,  to  whom  I  gave 
donations  in  land  and  presents.     I  ordered  funeral  offer- 
ings for  all  the  feasts  of  the  nether  world  [which  are  then 


V 


i 


'  It! 


1      ;    ( 


Hi 

in  I 

b 


1 60 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


enumerated  at  considerable  length].  If  it  happen  that  the 
priest  or  any  other  cease  to  do  this,  may  he  not  exist,  and 
may  his  son  not  sit  in  his  seat."  All  this  is  highly  in- 
structive from  the  point  of  view  of  the  origin  of  priesthood. 

How  long  these  early  religious  endowments  continued 
to  be  respected  is  shown  by  Mr.  Renouf  himself  in  one 
instructive  passage.  The  kings  who  built  the  Pyramids 
in  the  Early  Empire  endowed  a  priestly  ofifice  for  the 
purpose  of  celebrating  the  periodical  rites  of  offering  to 
their  ghosts  or  mummies.  Now,  a  tablet  in  the  Louvre 
shows  that  a  certain  person  who  lived  under  the  Twenty- 
sixth  Dynasty  was  priest  of  Khufu,  the  builder  of  the 
Great  Pyramid,  who  had  endowed  the  ofTice  two  thousand 
years  before  his  time.  We  have  actually  the  tombs  of 
some  of  his  predecessors  who  filled  the  same  office  imme- 
diately after  K.hufu*s  death.  So  that  in  this  instance  at 
least,  the  wor^'  p  of  the  deceased  monarch  continued  for 
a  couple  jf  thousand  years  without  interruption.  "  If  in 
the  case  of  private  interments,"  says  M.  Maspero,  "  we 
find  no  proof  of  so  persistent  a  veneration,  that  is  because 
in  ordinary  tombs  the  ceremonies  were  performed  not  by 
special  priests,  but  by  the  children  or  descendants  of  the 
deceased  person.  Often,  at  the  end  of  a  few  generations, 
either  through  negligence,  removals,  ruin,  or  extinction 
of  the  family,  the  cult  was  suspended,  and  the  memory  of 
the  dead  died  out  altogether." 

For  this  reason,  as  everywhere  else  among  ancestor- 
worshippers,  immense  importance  was  attached  by  the 
Egyptians  to  the  begetting  of  a  son  who  should  perform 
the  due  family  rites,  or  see  that  they  were  performed  by 
others  after  him.  The  duty  of  undertaking  these  rites  is 
thoroughly  insisted  upon  in  all  the  maxims  or  moral  texts  ; 
while  on  the  other  hand,  the  wish  that  a  man  may  not  have 
a  son  to  perform  them  for  him  is  the  most  terrible  of  all 
ancient  Egyptian  imprecations.  "  Many  centuries  after 
the  construction  of  a  tomb,  Egyptian  travellers  have  left 
a  record  upon  its  walls  of  the  splendour  of  the  sacred 


TOMBS  or   THE  KINGS. 


l6l 


abode,  of  the  abundance  of  the  materials  which  they  found 
provided  for  the  fulfilment  of  the  rites  for  the  departed, 
and  of  their  own  repetition  of  the  funeral  formula."  In 
fact,  the  whole  practical  religion  of  the  ordinary  Egyptians, 
as  a  plain  observer  sees  it  to-day  in  the  vast  mass  of  the 
existing  monuments,  consists  almost  exclusively  in  the 
worship  of  the  lea — the  genii,  manes,  or  lares  of  the  de- 
parted. 

If  even  the  common  herd  were  thus  carefully  embalmed 
— if  even  the  lesser  functionaries  of  the  court  or  temple 
lay  in  expensive  tombs,  daintily  painted  and  exquisitely 
sculptured — it  might  readily  be  believed  that  the  great 
kings  of  the  mighty  conquering  dynasties  themselves 
would  raise  for  their  mummies  eternal  habitations  of 
special  spendour  and  becoming  magnificence.  And  so 
they  did.  In  Lower  Egypt,  their  tombs  are  barrows  or 
pyramids  :  in  Upper  Egypt  they  are  artificial  caves.  The 
dreary  desert  district  west  of  the  Nile  and  south  of 
Cairo  consists  for  many  miles,  all  but  uninterruptedly,  of 
the  cemetery  of  Memphis — a  vast  and  mouldering  city  of 
the  dead — whose  chief  memorials  are  the  wonderful  series 
of  Pyramids,  the  desecrated  tombs  piled  up  for  the  kings 
of  the  Third,  Fourth,  Fifth,  and  Sixth  Dynasties.  There, 
under  stone  tumuli  of  enormous  size, — barrows  or  cairns 
more  carefully  constructed, — the  Pharaohs  of  the  Old 
Empire  reposed  in  peace  in  sepulchres  unmarked  by  any 
emblems  of  the  mystic  gods  or  sacred  beasts  of  later  imagi- 
nation. But  still  more  significant  and  infinitely  more 
beautiful  are  the  rock-hewn  Tombs  of  the  Kings  at 
Thebes,  belonging  to  the  great  monarchs  of  the  Eigh- 
teenth, Nineteenth  and  Twentieth  Dynasties,  when  the 
religion  had  assumed  its  full  mystical  development. 
Those  magnificent  subterranean  halls  form  in  the  truest 
and  most  literal  sense  a  real  necropolis,  a  town  of 
mummies,  where  each  king  was  to  inhabit  an  eternal 
palace  of  regal  splendour,  decorated  with  a  profusion  of 
polychromatic  art,  and  filled  with  many  mansions  for  the 


rr 


i' 


,■1 

-J* 


/i||! 


'    'i 


.|t;i 


162 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


officers  of  state,  still  destined  to  attend  upon  their  sove- 
reign in  the  nether  world.  Some  of  the  mural  paintings 
would  even  seem  to  suggest  that  slaves  or  captives  were 
sacrificed  at  the  tomb,  to  serve  their  lord  in  his  eternal 
home,  as  his  courtiers  had  served  him  in  the  temporal 
palaces  of  Medinet-Habu  or  the  corridors  of  Luxor. 

M.  Mariette  has  further  shown  that  the  huge  Theban 
temples  which  skirt  in  long  line  the  edge  of  the  desert  near 
the  Valley  of  Tombs  were  really  cenotaphs  where  the 
memory  of  the  kings  buried  hard  by  was  preserved  and 
worshipped.  Thus  the  Rameseum  was  the  imatabah  or 
mortuary  chapel  for  the  tomb  and  ghost  of  Rameses  II.  ; 
the  temple  of  Medinet-Habu  fulfilled  the  same  purpose  for 
Rameses  III.  ;  the  temple  of  Kurneh  for  Rameses  I.  ; 
and  so  forth  throughout  the  whole  long  series  of  those 
gigantic  ruins,  with  their  correlated  group  of  subterranean 
excavations. 

At  any  rate,  it  is  quite  impossible  for  any  impartial  per- 
son to  examine  the  existing  monuments  which  line  the 
grey  desert  hills  of  the  Nile  without  seeing  for  himself 
that  the  mummy  is  everywhere  the  central  object  of 
worship^that  the  entire  practical  religion  of  the  people 
was  based  upon  this  all-pervading  sense  of  the  continuity 
of  life  beyond  the  grave,  and  upon  the  necessity  for  pay- 
ing due  reverence  and  funereal  offerings  to  the  manes  of 
ancestors.  Everything  in  Egypt  points  to  this  one  con- 
clusion. Even  the  great  sacred  ritual  is  the  Book  of  the 
Dead  :  and  the  very  word  by  which  the  departed  are 
oftenest  described  means  itself  "  the  living,"  from  the  firm 
belief  of  the  people  that  they  were  really  enjoying  ever- 
lasting life.  Mors  janna  vitcc  is  the  short  summing-up  of 
Egyptian  religious  notions.  Death  was  the  great  begin- 
ning for  which  they  all  prepared,  and  the  dead  were  the 
real  objects  of  their  most  assiduous  public  and  private 
worship. 

Moreover,  in  the  tombs  themselves  we  can  trace  a 
gradual   development   of   the   religious   sentiment   from 


THE  GREAT  GODS. 


ir.3 


Corpse-Worship  to  God-Worship.  Thus,  in  the  tombs 
of  Sakkarah,  belonging  to  the  Old  Empire  (Fifth  Dy- 
nasty), all  those  symbolical  representations  of  the  life  be- 
yond the  tomb  which  came  in  with  the  later  mysticism  are 
almost  wholly  wanting.  The  quotations  from  (or  antici- 
pations of)  the  Book  of  the  Dead  are  few  and  short.  The 
great  gods  are  rarely  alluded  to.  Again,  in  the  grottos 
of  Beni-Hassan  (of  the  Twelfth  Dynasty)  the  paintings 
mostly  represent  scenes  from  the  life  of  the  deceased,  and 
the  mystic  signs  and  deities  are  still  absent.  The  doctrine 
of  rewards  and  punishments  remains  as  yet  ( omparatively 
in  abeyance.  It  is  only  at  the  Tomfis  of  the  Kings  at 
Thebes  (of  the  Eighteenth  Dynasty)  that  entire  chapters 
of  the  Book  of  the  Dead  are  transcribed  at  length,  and  the 
walls  are  covered  with  "  a  whole  army  of  grotesque  and 
fantastic  divinities." 

"  But  the  Egyptians,"  it  will  be  objected,  "  had  also 
great  gods,  distinct  from  their  ancestors — national,  or 
local,  or  common  gods — whose  names  and  figures  have 
come  down  to  us  inscribed  upon  all  the  monuments." 
Quite  true  :  that  is  to  say,  there  are  gods  who  are  not 
immediately  or  certainly  resolvable  into  deified  ancestors 
—gods  whose  power  and  might  were  at  last  widely  ex- 
tended, and  who  became  transfigured  by  degrees  beyond 
.i  1  1  'cognition  in  the  latest  ages.  But  it  is  by  no  means 
cer  ain,  even  so,  that  we  cannot  trace  these  greater  gods 
t^K'r  ^Nelves  bade  in  the  last  resort  to  deified  ancestors  of 
■va  )us  ruling  families  or  dominant  cities  ;  and  in  one  or 
{ v/o  of  the  most  important  rases  the  suggestions  of  such 
an  Mfigin  are  far  from  scanty. 

1  will  take,  to  begin  with,  one  typical  example.  There 
is  no  single  god  in  the  Egyptian  pantheon  more  important 
or  more  universally  diffused  than  Osiris.  In  later  forms 
of  the  national  religion,  he  is  elevated  into  the  judge  of 
the  departed  and  king  of  the  nether  world  :  to  be  "  justi- 
fied by  Osiris,"  or,  as  later  interpreters  say,  "  a  justified 
Osiris,"  is  the  prayer  of  every  corpse  as  set  forth  in  his 


i- 


(  I 


164 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


I-' 


[|!| 


funeral  inscription  ;  and  identification  with  Osiris  is 
looked  upon  as  the  reward  of  all  the  happy  and  faithful 
dead.  Now  Osiris,  in  every  one  of  his  representations 
and  modes,  is  simply — a  Mummy.  His  myth,  to  be  sure, 
assumed  at  last  immense  proportions  ;  and  his  relations 
with  Isis  and  Horus  form  the  centre  of  an  endless  series 
of  irreconcilable  tales,  repeated  over  and  over  again  in 
art  and  literature.  If  we  took  mythology  as  our  guide, 
instead  of  the  monuments,  we  should  be  tempted  to  give 
him  far  other  origins.  He  is  idei-tified  often  with  othef 
gods,  especially  with  Amen  ;  and  the  disentanglement  of 
his  personality  in  the  monuments  of  the  newer  empire, 
when  Ra,  the  sun-god,  got  mixed  up  inextricably  with  so 
many  other  deities,  is  particularly  difficult.  But  if  we 
neglect  these  later  complications  of  a  very  ancient  cult, 
and  go  back  to  the  simplest  origin  of  Egyptian  history  and 
religion,  we  shall,  I  think,  see  that  this  mystic  god,  so 
often  explained  away  by  elemental  symbolism  into  the  sun 
or  the  home  of  the  dead,  was  in  his  first  beginnings  nothing 
more  or  less  than  what  all  his  pictures  and  statues  show 
him  to  be — a  revered  and  worshipped  Mummy,  a  very 
ancient  chief  or  king  of  the  town  or  little  district  of  This 
by  Abydos. 

I  do  not  deny  that  in  later  ages  Osiris  became  much 
more  than  this.  Nor  do  I  deny  that  his  name  was  ac- 
cepted as  a  symbol  for  all  the  happy  and  pious  dead. 
Furthermore,  we  shall  find  at  a  later  stage  that  he  was 
identified  in  the  end  with  an  annual  slain  Corn-God.  I 
will  even  allov/  that  there  niav  have  been  more  than  one 
original  Osiris — that  the  word  may  even  at  first  have  been 
generic,  not  specific.  But  I  still  maintain  that  the  evi- 
dence shows  us  the  great  and  principal  Osiris  of  all  as  a 
Dead  Chief  of  Abydos. 

We  must  remember  that  in  ITgypt  alone  history  goes 
back  to  an  immense  antiquity  and  yet  shows  us  already  at 
its  very  beginning  an  advanced  civilisation  and  a  developed 
picture-writing.     Therefore  the  very  oldest  known  state 


WHO  WAS  OSIRIS  f 


165 


of  Egypt  necessarily  presupposes  a  vast  anterior  era  of 
slow  growth  in  concentration  and  culture.  Before  ever 
Upper  or  Lower  Egypt  became  united  under  a  single 
crown,  there  must  have  been  endless  mud-built  villages 
and  petty  palm-shadowed  principalities  along  the  bank  of 
the  Nile,  each  possessing  its  own  local  chief  or  king,  and 
each  worshipping  its  own  local  deceased  potentates.  The 
sheikh  of  the  village,  as  we  should  call  him  nowadays,  was 
then  their  nameless  Pharaoh,  and  the  mummies  of  his  an- 
cestors were  their  gods  and  goddesses.  Each  tribe  had 
also  its  special  totem,  about  which  I  shall  have  a  little 
more  to  say  hereafter  ;  and  these  totems  were  locally 
worshipped  almost  as  gods,  and  gave  rise  in  all  probability 
to  the  later  Egyptian  Zoolatry  and  the  animal-headed 
deities.  To  the  very  last,  Egyptian  religion  bore  marked 
traces  of  this  original  tribal  form  ;  the  great  multiplicity 
of  Egyptian  gods  seems  to  be  due  to  the  adoption  of  so 
many  of  them,  after  the  unification  of  the  country,  into  the 
national  pantheon.  The  local  gods  and  local  totems,  how- 
ever, continued  to  be  specially  worshipped  in  their  original 
sites.  Thus  the  ithyphallic  Amen-Khem  was  specially 
worshipped  at  Thebes,  where  his  figure  occurs  with  un- 
pleasant frequency  upon  every  temple  ;  Apis  was  pecu- 
liarly sacred  at  Memphis  ;  Pasht  at  Bubastis  ;  Anubis  at 
Sekhem  ;  Neith  at  Sais  ;  Ra  at  Heliopolis  ;  and  Osiris 
himself  at  Abydos,  his  ancient  dwelling-place. 

Even  Egyptian  tradition  seems  to  preserve  some  dim 
memory  of  such  a  state  of  things,  for  it  a^bcrts  that  before 
the  time  of  Menes,  the  first  king  of  the  First  Dynasty,  re- 
puted the  earliest  monarch  of  a  united  Egypt,  dynasties 
of  the  gods  ruled  in  the  country.  In  other  words,  it  was 
recognised  that  the  gods  were  originally  kings  of  local 
lines  which  reigned  in  the  various  provinces  of  the  Nile 
valley  before  the  unification. 

In  the  case  of  Osiris,  the  indications  which  lead  us  in 
this  direction  are  almost  irresistible.  It  is  all  but  certain 
that  Osiris  was  originally  a  local  god  of  This  or  Thinis, 


I; 


pi 


1 66 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


a  village  near  Abydos,  wher  a  huge  mound  of  rubbish 
still  marks  the  site  of  the  great  deity's  resting-place.  The 
latter  town  is  described  in  the  Harris  papyrus  as  Abud, 
the  hand  of  Osiris  ;  and  in  the  monuments  which  still  re- 
main at  that  site,  Osiris  is  everywhere  the  chief  deity  rep- 
resented, to  whom  kings  and  priests  present  appropriate 
oflferings.  But  it  is  a  significant  fact  that  Menes,  the 
founder  of  the  united  monarchy,  was  born  at  the  same 
place  ;  and  this  suggests  the  probabiHty  that  Osiris  may 
have  been  the  most  sacred  and  most  venerated  of  Menes's 
ancestors.  The  suggestion  derives  further  weight  from 
the  fact  that  Osiris  is  invariably  represented  as  a  mummy, 
and  that  he  wears  a  peculiar  head-dress  or  cap  of  office, 
the  same  as  that  which  was  used  in  historical  times  as  the 
crown  of  Upper  Egypt.  He  also  holds  in  his  hands  the 
crook  and  scourge  which  are  the  marks  of  kingly  office — 
the  crook  to  lead  his  own  people  like  a  shepherd,  the 
scourge  to  punish  evil-doers  and  to  ward  off  enemies.  His 
image  is  therefore  nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  image 
of  a  Mummied  King.  Sometimes,  too,  he  wears  in  ad- 
dition the  regal  ostrich  plumes.  Surely,  naught  save  the 
blind  infatuation  of  mythologists  could  make  them  over- 
look the  plain  inference  that  Osiris  was  a  mummified  chief 
of  Abydos  in  the  days  before  the  unification  of  Egypt 
under  a  single  rule,  and  that  he  was  worshipped  by  his 
successors  in  the  petty  principality  exactly  as  we  know 
other  kingly  mummies  were  worshipped  by  their  family 
elsewhere — exactly,  for  example,  as  on  the  famous  Tablet 
of  Ancestors  found  at  Abydos  itself,  Sethi  I.  and  Rameses 
II.  are  seen  offering  homage  to  seventy-six  historical 
kings,  their  predecessors  on  the  throne  of  United  Egypt. 

Not  only,  however,  i*;  Osiris  represented  as  a  king  and  a 
mummy,  but  we  are  expressly  told  by  Plutarch  (or  at  least 
by  the  author  of  the  tract  De  Osiride  which  bears  his 
rame)  that  the  tomb  of  Osiris  existed  at  Abydos,  and  that 
the  richest  and  most  powerful  of  the  Egyptians  were  de- 
sirous of  being  buried  in  the  adjacent  cemetery,  in  order 


GROWTH  OF  OSIRIS-WORSHIP. 


167 


that  they  might  lie,  as  it  were,  in  the  same  grave  with  the 
great  god  of  their  country.  All  this  is  perfectly  compre- 
hensible and  natural  if  we  suppose  that  a  Thinite  dynasty 
first  conquered  the  whole  of  Egypt  ;  that  it  extenaed  the 
worship  of  its  own  local  ancestor-god  over  the  entire 
country  ;  and  that  in  time,  when  this  worship  had  assumed 
national  importance,  the  local  god  became  the  chief  figure 
in  the  common  pantheon. 

I  had  arrived  at  this  opinion  independently  before  T  was 
aware  that  Mr.  Loftie  had  anticipated  me  in  it.  But  in 
his  rare  and  interesting  Essay  on  Scarabs  I  find  he  has 
reached  the  same  conclusions. 

"  The  divinity  of  Pharaoh,"  says  Mr.  Loftie,  "  was  the 
first  article  in  the  creed  of  the  pyramid  period,  the  earliest 
of  which  we  know  anything.  As  time  went  on,  though 
the  king  was  still  called  divine,  we  see  him  engaged  in  the 
worship  of  other  gods.  At  last  he  appears  as  a  priest  him- 
self ;  and  when  Herodotus  and  the  later  Greek  historians 
visited  Egypt,  there  was  so  little  of  this  part  of  the  old 
religion  left  that  it  is  not  even  mentioned  by  them  as  a 
matter  of  importance."  This  is  quite  natural,  I  may  re- 
mark parenthetically,  for  as  the  antiquity  and  grandeur  of 
the  great  gods  increased,  the  gulf  between  them  and  mere 
men,  even  though  those  "len  were  kings,  their  offspring, 
must  always  have  grown  ever  wider  and  wider.  "  I  have 
myself  no  doubt  whatever,"  Mr.  Loftie  goes  on,  ''  that  the 
names  of  Osiris  and  of  Horus  are  those  of  ancient  rulers. 
I  think  that,  long  before  authentic  history  begins,  Asar 
and  Aset  his  wife  reigned  in  Egypt,  probably  in  that  vide 
valley  of  the  Upper  Nile  which  is  now  the  site  of  Girgeh 
and  Berbe "  (exactly  where  I  place  the  principaHty  of 
Osiris).  "  Their  son  was  Hor,  or  Horus,  the  first  king  of 
Upper  and  Lower  Egypt;  and  the  '  Hor  seshoo,'  the  suc- 
cessors of  Horus,  are  not  obscurely  mentioned  by  later 
chroniclers.  I  know  that  this  view  is  not  shared  by  all 
students  of  the  subject,  and  much  learning  and  ingenuity 
have  been  spent  to  prove  that  Asar,  and  Aset,  and  Hor, 


?.  1 


^^ 


l< 

I 


1 68 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


and  Ptah,  and  Anep,  are  representations  of  the  powers  of 
nature  ;  that  they  do  not  point  to  ancient  princes,  but  to 
ancient  principles;  and  that  Horus  and  his  successors  are 
gods  and  were  never  men.  But  in  the  oldest  inscriptions 
we  find  none  of  that  mysticism  which  is  shown  in  the  sculp- 
tures from  the  time  of  the  eighteenth  dynasty  down  to 
the  Ptolemies  and  the  Roman  Emperors."  '  In  short,  Mr. 
Loftie  goes  on  to  set  forth  a  theory  of  the  origin  of  the 
great  gods  essentially  similar  to  the  one  I  am  here  defend- 


ing. 


Though  a  little  out  of  place,  I  cannot  help  noting  here 
the  curious  confirmatory  fact  that  a  number  of  ibis  mum- 
mies have  been  found  at  Abydos  in  close  proximity  to  the 
mound  where  M.  Mariette  confidently  expected  to  dis- 
cover in  the  rock  the  actual  tomb  of  Osiris  himself. 
Hence  we  may  conclude  that  the  ibis  was  in  all  pro1)ability 
the  totem  of  Abydos  or  This,  as  the  bull  was  of  Memphis, 
the  crocodile  of  the  Fayouiu,  the  cat  of  Bubastis,  and  the 
baboon  of  Thelies.  Now,  the  ibis-god  of  Abydos  is 
Thoth;  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  Thoth,  as  recorder,  al- 
ways accompanies  Osiris,  in  later  legend,  as  judge  of  the 
dead:  the  local  mummy-god,  in  other  words,  has  as  his 
assessor  the  local  (oteni-god;  and  both  are  commonly  to 
be  seen  on  the  monuments  of  Abydos,  m  company  with 
Plorus,  Anubis,  Isi'^.  and  other  (probably)  local  divinities. 

It  is  quite  easy  to  see  how,  with  this  origin,  Osiris  would 
almost  inevitaljly  grow  with  time  to  be  the  King  of  the 
Dead,  and  supreme  judge  of  the  nether  regions.  For,  as 
the  most  sacred  of  the  ancestors  of  the  regal  line,  he  would 
naturally  be  the  one  whom  the  kings,  in  their  turn, 
would  most  seek  to  propitiate,  and  whom  they  would 
look  forward  to  joining  in  their  eternal  home.  As  ihe 
myth  extended,  and  as  mystical  interpretations  began  to 
creep  in,  identifications  being  made  oi  the  gods  with  the 
sun  or  other  natural  energies,  the  original  meaning  of 
Osiris-worship  would  grow  gradually  obscured.  But  to 
the  last,  Osiris  himself,  in  spite  of  all  corruptions,  is  repre- 


■1 


I 

i 


VARIOUS  FORMS  OF  OSIRIS.  169 

sented  as  a  mummy:  and  even  when  identified  with  Amen, 
the  later  intrusive  god,  he  still  wears  his  mummy- 
bandages,  and  still  bears  the  crook  and  scourge  and 
sceptre  of  his  primitive  kingship. 

It  may  be  objected,  however,  that  there  were  many 
forms  of  Crisis,  and  many  local  gods  who  bore  the  same 
name.  He  was  buried  at  Abydos,  but  was  also  equally 
buried  at  Memphis,  and  at  Philae  as  well.  The  pretty  little 
"  Temple  on  the  Roof "  at  Denderah  is  an  exquisitely 
elaborate  chapel  to  the  local  Osiris  of  that  town,  with 
chambers  dedicated  to  the  various  other  Osiris-gods  of 
the  forty-two  nomes  of  ancient  Egypt.  Well,  that  fact 
runs  exactly  parallel  with  the  local  Madonnas  and  the 
local  Apollos  of  other  religions  :  and  nobody  has  sug- 
gested doubts  as  to  the  human  reality  of  the  Blessed 
Virgin  Mary  because  so  many  different  Maries  exist  in 
different  sacred  sites  or  in  different  cathedrals.  Our  Lady 
of  Loretto  is  the  same  as  Our  Lady  of  Lourdes.  Jesus  of 
Nazareth  was  nevertheless  born  at  Bethlehem:  he  was 
the  son  of  Joseph,  but  he  was  also  the  son  of  David,  and 
the  son  of  God.  Perhaps  Osiris  was  a  common  noun  : 
perhaps  a  slightly  different  Osiris  was  worshipped  in  vari- 
ous towns  of  later  Egypt;  perhaps  a  local  mummy-god, 
the  ancestor  of  some  extinct  native  line,  often  wrongly 
usurped  the  name  and  prerogatives  of  the  great  mummy- 
god  of  Abydos,  especially  under  the  influence  of  late 
priestly  mysticism.  Moreover,  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  subject  of  the  manufacture  of  gods,  we  shall  see  that 
the  body  of  an  annual  incarnation  of  Osiris  may  have  been 
divided  and  distributed  among  all  the  nomes  of  Egypt. 
It  is  enough  for  my  present  purpose  if  I  point  out  in  brief 
that  ancestor-worship  amply  explains  the  rise  and  pre- 
valence of  the  cult  of  Osiris,  the  kingly  mummy,  with  the 
associated  cults  of  Horus,  Isis,  Thoth,  and  the  other  deities 
of  the  Osirian  cycle. 

T  may  add  that  a  gradual  growth  of  Osiris-worship  is 
clearly    marked    on    the    monuments    themselves.      The 


F 


fl:' 


170 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


\i  • 


simpler  stelae  and  memorials  'f  the  earliest  age  seldom 
contain  the  names  of  any  god,  but  display  votaries  making 
offerings  at  the  shrine  of  ancestors.  Similarly,  the  scenes 
represented  on  the  walls  of  tombs  of  early  date  bear  no 
reference  to  the  great  gods  of  later  ages,  but  are  merely 
domestic  and  agricultural  in  character,  as  may  be  observed 
at  Sakkarah  and  even  to  some  extent  also  at  Beni-Hassan. 
Under  the  Sixth  Dynasty,  the  monuments  begin  to  make 
more  and  more  frequent  mention  of  Osiris,  who  now 
comes  to  be  regarded  as  Judge  of  the  Dead  and  Lord  of 
the  Lower  World  ;  and  on  a  tablet  of  this  age  in  the 
Boulak  Museum  occurs  for  the  first  time  the  expression 
afterwards  so  common,  "  justified  by  Osiris."  Under  the 
Twelfth  Dynasty,  legend  becomes  more  prominent  ;  a  solar 
and  lunar  character  seems  to  be  given  by  reflex  to  Osiris 
and  Isis:  and  the  name  of  Ra,  the  sun,  is  added  to  that  of 
many  pre  iously  distinct  and  independent  deities.  Khem, 
the  ithyphallic  god  of  the  Thebaid,  now  also  assumes 
greater  importance,  as  is  quite  natural  under  a  line  of 
Theban  princes:  and  Khem,  a  local  mummy-god,  is  always 
represented  in  his  swathing-clothes,  and  afterwards  con- 
founded, certainly  with  Amen,  and  probably  also  with  the 
mummy-god  of  Abydos.  But  Osiris  from  this  time  for- 
ward rises  distinctly  into  the  front  rank  as  a  deity.  "  To 
him,  rather  than  to  the  dead,  the  friends  and  family  offer 
their  sacrifices.  A  court  is  formed  for  him.  Thoth,  the 
recorder  [totem-god  of  Abydos],  Anubis  the  watcher,  Ra 
the  impersonation  of  truth,  and  others,  assist  in  judgment 
on  the  soul."  The  name  of  the  deceased  is  henceforth 
constantly  accompanied  by  the  formula  "  justified  by 
Osiris."  About  the  same  time  the  Book  of  the  Dead  in 
its  full  form  came  into  existence,  with  its  developed  con- 
ception of  the  lower  world,  and  it?  complicated  arrange- 
ment of  plau?"  of  purgatorial  progress. 

Under  the  Eighteenth  Dynasty,  the  legend  thickens  ; 
the  identifications  of  the  gods  become  more  and  more  in- 
tricate ;    Amen  and  Ra  are  sought  and  found  under  in- 


THE  SYNCRETIC   TENDENCY.  171 

numerable  forms  of  other  deities;  and  a  foundation  is  laid 
for  the  esoteric  Monotheism  or  pantheistic  nature-worship 
of  the  later  philosophising  priesthood.  It  was  under  the 
Nineteenth  Dynasty  that  the  cult  of  local  Triads  or 
Trinities  took  fullest  shape,  and  that  the  mystical  interpre- 
tation of  the  religion  of  Egypt  came  well  into  ibe  fore- 
ground. The  great  Osirian  myth  was  then  more  and 
more  minutely  and  mystically  elaborated;  and  even  the 
bull  Apis,  the  totem-god  of  Memphis,  was  recognised  as  a 
special  incarnation  of  Osiris,  who  thus  becomes,  with 
Amen,  the  mysterious  summing-up  of  almost  all  the  na- 
tional pantheon.  At  last  we  find  the  myth  going  off  into 
pure  mysticism,  Osiris  being  at  once  the  father,  brother, 
husband,  and  son  of  Isis,  and  also  the  son  of  his  own  child 
Horus.*  Sentences  with  an  almost  Athanasian  mixture 
of  vagueness  and  definiteness  inform  us  how  "  the  son 
proceeds  from  the  father,  and  the  father  proceeds  from  his 
son  " ;  how  "  Ra  is  the  soul  of  Osiris,  and  Osiris  the  soul  of 
Ra  ";  and  how  Horus  his  child,  awakened  by  magical  rites 
from  his  dead  body,  is  victorious  over  Set,  the  prince  of 
darkness,  and  sits  as  Osiris  upon  the  throne  of  the  father 
whom  he  has  revived  and  avenged.  Here  as  elsewhere 
the  myth,  instead  of  being  the  explanation  of  the  god, 
does  nothing  more  than  darken  counsel. 

In  like  manner,  I  believe,  Ptah  was  originally  a  local 
mummy-god  of  Memphis,  and  Khem  of  Ap,  afterwards 
known  as  Chemmis. 

This  gradual  growth  of  a  dead  and  mummified  village 
chief,  however,  into  a  pantheistic  god,  strange  as  it  may 
seem,  is  not  in  any  way  more  remarkable  than  the  gradual 


*•' Stories  like  the  Osiris  myth,"  says  Mr.  Lang,  "spring  from  no 
pure  religious  source,  but  embody  the  delusions  and  fantastic  dreams 
of  the  lowest  and  least .  eveloped  human  fancy  and  human  speculation." 
This  sentence  enforces  precisely  the  same  idea  that  I  have  previously 
expressed  in  chapter  ii.  as  to  the  real  relations  of  religion  and  mythol- 
ogy. The  myth  nowhere  explains  the  cult ;  it  casts  no  light  upon  its 
origin  or  history  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  only  obscures  and  overshadows 
the  underlying  kernel  of  genuine  fact. 


I 


172 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


growth  of  a  Galilean  peasant  into  the  second  person  of  an 
eternal  and  omnipotent  Godhead.  Nor  does  the  myth 
of  the  death  and  resurrection  of  Osiris  (to  be  considered 
hereafter  in  a  later  chapter)  militate  against  the  reality 
of  his  human  existence  any  more  than  the  history  of  the 
death  and  resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ  militates  against  the 
human  existence  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  "  Gross  and  crude 
euhemerism  "  may  "be  bad;  but  airy  and  fantastic  Max- 
miillerism  appears  to  me  just  as  unphilosophical. 

The  difficulty  of  the  evolution,  indeed,  is  not  at  all  great, 
if  we  consider  the  further  fact  that  even  after  the  concept 
of  godship  had  been  fully  developed,  the  king  still  re- 
mained of  like  nature  with  the  gods,  their  son  and  des'-en- 
dant,  a  divine  personage  himself,  differing  from  them  only 
in  not  having  yet  received  eternal  life,  the  symbol  of  which 
they  are  often  shown  in  sculpture  as  presenting  with 
gracious  expressions  to  their  favoured  scion.  "  The  ruling 
sovereign  of  Egypt,"  says  Mr.  Le  Page  Renouf,  "  was  the 
living  image  of  and  vicegerent  of  the  sun-god.  He  was 
invested  with  the  attributes  of  divinity,  and  that  in  the 
earliest  times  of  which  we  possess  monumental  evidence." 
And  quite  naturally,  for  in  antique  times  gods  had  ruled 
in  Egypt,  whose  successor  the  king  was:  and  the  kings 
before  Menes  were  significantly  known  as  "  the  successors 
of  Horus."  As  late  as  the  times  of  the  Ptolemies,  we  saw, 
there  were  priests  of  Menes  and  other  Pharaohs  of  the  most 
ancient  dynasties.  The  pyramid  kings  took  the  title  of  the 
Golden  Horus,  afterwards  copied  by  their  descendants; 
and  from  Chafra  onward  the  reigning  monarch  was  known 
as  the  Son  of  Ra  and  the  Great  God.  Amenophis  H., 
during  his  own  lifetime,  is  "  a  god  good  like  Ra,  the  sacred 
seed  of  Amen,  the  son  whom  he  begot."  And  on  all  the 
monuments  the  king  is  represented  of  the  same  super- 
human stature  as  the  gods  themselves:  he  converses  with 
them  on  equal  terms;  they  lead  him  by  the  hand  into 
their  inmost  sanctuaries,  or  present  him  with  the  symbols 
of  royal  rule  and  of  eternal  life,  like  friends  of  the  family. 


GODS  AND  KINGS. 


173 


The  former  guerdon  bestows  upon  him  the  same  rank  they 
themselves  had  held  on  earth;  the  latter  advances  him  to 
share  with  them  the  glories  of  the  other  existence.  In 
the  temple  of  Kurneh,  Rameses  I.  (then  dead)  receives 
the  offerings  and  liturgies  of  his  royal  grandson.  Hard 
by,  Rameses  II.  offers  to  Amen-ra,  Khonso,  and  Rameses 
I.,  without  distinction  of  divinity.  On  the  side  wall, 
Sethi  I.  receives  similar  divine  honours  from  the  royal 
hands:  while  in  the  centre  chamber  Sethi  himself  officiates 
before  the  statue  of  his  father  placed  in  a  shrine.  The 
King  is  thus  but  the  Living  God  :  the  God  is  thus  but  the 
Dead  King. 

I  conclude,  therefore,  that  a  large  part  of  the  greater 
Egyptian  gods — the  national  or  local  gods,  as  opposed  to 
those  worshipped  by  each  family  in  its  own  necropolis — 
were  early  kings,  whose  myths  were  later  expanded  into 
legends,  rationalised  into  nature-worship,  and  adorned  by 
priestly  care  with  endless  symbolical  or  esoteric  fancies. 
But  down  to  the  very  latest  age  of  independence,  inscrip- 
tions of  the  god  Euergetes,  and  the  goddess  Berenice,  or 
representations  like  that  at  Philje,  of  the  god  Philadelphus 
suckled  by  Isis,  show  that  to  the  Egyptian  mind  the  gulf 
between  humanity  and  divinity  was  very  narrow,  and  that 
the  original  manhood  of  all  the  deities  was  an  idea  quite 
familiar  to  priests  and  people. 

There  was,  however,  another  class  of  gods  about  which 
we  can  be  somewhat  less  certain  ;  these  are  the  animal- 
gods  and  animal-headed  gods  which  developed  out  of  the 
totems  of  the  various  villages.  Such  bestial  types,  Pro- 
fessor Sayce  remarks,  "  take  us  back  to  a  remote  pre- 
historic age,  when  the  religious  creed  of  Egypt,"  say 
rather,  the  custom  of  Egypt,  "  was  still  totemism."  But 
in  what  precise  relation  totemism  stood  to  the  main  line 
of  the  evolution  of  gods  I  do  not  feel  quite  so  sure  in  my 
own  mind  as  does  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer.  It  seems  to  me 
possible  that  the  totem  may  in  its  origin  have  been  merely 
the  lucky-beast  or  badge  of  a  particular  tribe  (like  the 


fV     i^ 


i' 


h    > 


1 

If        ' 


174 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


regimental  goat  or  deer)  ;  and  that  from  being  at  first 
petted,  domesticated,  and  to  some  extent  respected  on 
this  account,  it  may  have  grown  at  last,  through  a  con- 
fusion of  ideas,  to  share  the  same  sort  of  divine  honours 
which  \  ere  paid  to  the  ghosts  of  ancestors  and  the  gods 
evolved  from  them.  But  Mr.  Frazer  has  suggested  a 
better  origin  of  totemism  from  the  doctrine  of  the  Sepa- 
rable Soul,  which  is,  up  to  date,  the  best  explanation  yet 
offered  of  this  obscun^  subject.  Be  that  as  it  may,  if  the 
totems  were  only  gradually  elevated  into  divinities,  we 
can  easily  understand  Mr.  Renouf's  remark  that  the  long 
series  of  tombs  of  the  Apis  bulls  at  Sakkarah  shows  "  how 
immeasurably  greater  the  devotion  to  the  sacred  animals 
was  in  the  later  times  than  in  the  former." 

May  I  add  that  the  zvorship  of  totems,  as  distinct  from 
the  mere  care  implied  by  Mr.  Frazer's  suggestion,  very 
probably  arose  from  the  custom  of  carving  the  totem- 
animal  of  the  deceased  on  the  grave-stake  or  grave- 
board  ?  This  custom  is  still  universal  among  the  Indian 
tribes  of  Northwestern  America. 

Nevertheless,  whatever  be  the  true  origin  of  the  totem- 
gods,  I  do  not  think  totemism  militates  in  any  way  against 
the  general  principle  of  the  evolution  of  the  idea  of  a  god 
from  the  ghost,  the  Dead  Man,  or  the  deified  ancestor. 
For  only  after  the  concept  of  a  god  had  been  formed  from 
ancestor-cult,  and  only  after  worship  had  been  evolved 
from  the  customary  ofiferings  to  the  mummy  or  spirit  at 
the  tomb,  could  any  other  object  by  any  possibility  be 
elevated  to  the  godhead.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  as  I 
have  before  remarked,  do  I  feel  inclined  wholly  to  agree 
with  Mr.  Spencer  that  every  individual  god  was  neces- 
sarily once  a  particular  Dead  Man.  It  seems  to  me  in- 
dubitable that  after  the  idea  of  godhead  had  become  fully 
fixed  in  the  human  mind,  some  gods  at  least  began  to  be 
recognised  who  were  directly  framed  either  from  abstract 
conceptions,  from  natural  objects,  or  from  pure  outbursts 
of  the  mythopceic  faculty.     I  do  not  think,  therefore,  that 


II! 


EGYPTIAN  TOTEM-GODS. 


175 


the  existence  of  a  certain  (relatively  unimportant)  class  of 
totem-gods  in  Egypt  or  elsewhere  is  necessarily  incon- 
sistent in  any  way  with  our  main  theory  of  the  origin  of 
godhead. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  it  is  at  anj  rate  clear  that  totemism 
itself  was  a  very  ancient  and  widespread  institution  in 
early  Egypt.  Totems  are  defined  by  Mr.  Frazer  as  "  a 
class  of  material  objects  which  a  savaj^e  regards  with 
superstitious  respect,  believing  that  there  exists  between 
him  and  every  member  of  the  class  an  intimate  and  alto- 
gether special  relation."  '  Observation  of  existing  totem 
tribes  in  Africa,  Australia,  and  elsewhere,"  says  Sir  Martin 
Conway,  "  shows  us  that  one  or  more  representatives  of 
the  totem  are  often  fed  or  even  kept  alive  in  captivity  by 
the  tribe."  Mr.  Frazer  tells  us  that  '*  amongst  the  Nar- 
rinyeri  in  South  Australia,  men  of  the  snake  clan  some- 
times catch  snakes,  pull  out  their  teeth,  or  sew  up  their 
mouths,  and  keep  them  as  pets.  In  a  pigeon  clan  of 
Samoa  a  pigeon  was  carefully  kept  and  fed.  Amongst  the 
Kalong  in  Java,  whose  totem  is  a  red  dog,  each  family  as  a 
rule  keeps  one  of  these  animals,  which  they  will  on  no 
account  allow  to  be  struck  or  ill-used  by  any  one."  In  the 
same  way,  no  doubt,  certain  Egyptian  clans  kept  sacred 
bulls,  cats,  crocodiles,  hawks,  jackals,  cobras,  lizards,  ibises, 
asps,  and  beetles.  Mummies  of  most  of  these  sacred  ani- 
mals, and  little  images  of  others,  are  common  in  the  neigh- 
bourhood of  certain  places  where  they  were  specially  wor- 
shipped. 

Whether  the  animal-headed  gods  represent  a  later  scage 
of  the  same  totem-worship,  or  whether  they  stand  merely 
for  real  ancestor-gods  belonging  to  a  particular  totem- 
clan,  and  therefore  represented  by  its  totem,  is  not  a  ques- 
tion easily  settled.  But  at  any  rate  it  is  clear  that  many 
gods  are  the  equivalents  of  such  totem-animals,  as  is  the 
case  wivh  the  hawk-headed  Horus,  the  jackal-headed 
Anubis,  the  cow-headed  Athor,  the  ram-headed  Knum, 
the  cat-headed  Pasht,  the  lion-headed  Sekhet,  the  ibis- 


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THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


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111 


headed  Thoth,  and  the  kestrel-headed  Khons.  These 
gods  appear  on  the  earlier  monuments  as  beasts  alone,  not 
as  human  forms  with  bestial  heads.  Till  the  Twelfth 
Dynasty,  when  a  totem-god  is  mentioned  (which  is  not 
often),  "  he  is  represented,"  says  Mr.  Flinders  Petrie,  "  by 
his  animal."  Anubis,  for  example,  at  this  stage,  is  merely 
a  jackal ;  and  as  M.  Maspero  puts  it,  "  Whatever  may 
have  been  the  object  of  worship  in  Thoth-Ibis,  it  was  a 
bird,  not  a  hieroglyph,  that  the  earliest  ibis-worshippers 
adored."  There  were  other  totems,  however,  which  were 
less  fruitful  in  deities,  but  which  entered  largely  in  artistic 
forms  into  the  later  religious  symbolism.  Such  were  es- 
pecially the  asp  and  the  sacred  scarabseus,  which  almost 
rival  the  sun-disk  in  the  large  part  they  play  in  the  de- 
veloped religious  art-language  of  the  great  temple-build- 
ing dynasties.  I  may  add  that  among  the  other  symbols 
of  this  curious  emblematical  picture-writing  arc  the  Tau 
or  crux  ansata,  by  origin  apparently  a  combined  linga  and 
yoni  ;  the  lotuSj  the  sceptre,  the  leek,  and  the  crescent. 

There  is,  however,  yet  a  third  class  of  divine  or  quasi- 
divine  beings  in  the  newer  Egyptian  Pantheon  to  which 
Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  in  his  able  introduction  to  the  Euterpe 
of  Herodotus,  still  allows  that  great  importance  may  be 
attached.  These  are  the  elemental  or  seemingly  elemental 
deities,  the  Nature-Gods  who  play  so  large  a  part  in  all 
rationalistic  or  mystical  mythologies.  Such  are  no  doubt 
Nut  and  Seb,  the  personal  heaven  and  earth,  named  as 
early  as  the  inscription  on  the  coffin  of  Menkaoura  of  the 
Fourth  Dynasty  in  the  British  Museum  :  such  perhaps 
(though  far  less  certainly)  are  Khons,  identified  with  the 
rising  sun,  and  Tum,  regarded  as  the  impersonation  of 
his  nightly  setting.  But  none  of  the  quite  obviously  ele- 
mental gods,  except  Ra,  play  any  large  part  in  the  actual 
and  practical  worship  of  the  people  :  to  adopt  the  broad 
distinction  I  have  ventured  to  draw  in  our  second  chapter, 
they  are  gods  to  talk  about,  not  gods  to  adore — mythologi- 
cal conceptions  rather  than  religious  beings.    Their  names 


;a 


^•1 


THE  INTRUSIVE  SOLAR  ELEMENT. 


177 


occur  much  in  the  sacred  texts,  but  their  images  are  rare 
and  their  temples  unknown.  It  is  not  Nut  or  Seb  whose 
figures  we  see  carved  abundantly  in  relief  on  the  grey 
sandstone  pillars  of  Karnak  and  Luxor,  painted  in  endless 
file  on  the  gesso-covered  walls  of  the  Tombs  of  the  Kings, 
or  represented  by  dozens  in  the  great  collect "on  of  little 
bronze  idols  that  fill  so  many  cabinets  at  the  Boulak  Mu- 
seum. The  actual  objects  of  the  highest  worship  are  far 
other  than  these  abstract  elemental  conceptions  :  they  are 
Osiris,  Isis,  Horus,  Anubis,  Khem,  Pasht,  and  Athor. 
The  quaint  or  grotesque  incised  figures  of  Nut,  repre- 
sented as  a  female  form  with  arms  and  legs  extended  like 
a  living  canopy  over  the  earth,  as  at  Denderah,  belong,  I 
believe,  almost  if  not  quite  ^exclusively  to  the  Ptolemaic 
period,  when  zodiacal  and  astrological  conceptions  had 
been  freely  borrowed  by  the  Egyptians  from  Greece  and 
Asia.  Nut  and  Seb,  as  gods,  not  myths,  are  in  short  quite 
recent  ideas  in  Egypt.  Even  sun-disk  Ra,  himself,  im- 
portant as  'le  becomes  in  the  later  developed  creed,  is 
hardly  so  much  in  his  origin  a  separate  god  as  an  adjunct 
or  symbol  of  divinity  united  syncretically  with  the  various 
other  deities.  To  call  a  king  the  sun  is  a  common  piece 
of  courtier  flattery.  It  is  as  Amen-Ra  or  as  Osiris  that 
the  sun  receives  most  actual  worship.  His  name  is  joined 
to  the  names  of  gods  as  to  the  names  of  kings  :  he  is  al- 
most as  much  a  symbol  as  the  Tau  or  the  Asp  ;  he  obtains 
little  if  any  adoration  in  his  simple  form,  but  plenty  when 
conjoined  in  a  compound  conception  with  some  more 
practical  deity  of  strictly  human  origin.  Even  at  the  great 
"  Temple  of  the  Sun  "  at  Heliopolis,  it  was  as  the  bull  Men 
or  Mnevis  that  the  luminary  was  adored  :  and  that  cult, 
according  to  Manetho,  went  back  as  far  as  the  totemistic 
times  of  the  Second  D'^nasty. 

To  put  it  briefly,  then,  I  hold  that  the  element  of  nature- 
worship  is  a  late  gloss  or  superadded  factor  in  the  Egyp- 
tian religion;  that  it  is  always  rather  mythological  or  ex- 
planatory than  religious  in  the  strict  sense  ;  and  that  it 


^1  it 


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178 


THE  GODS  OF  EGYPT. 


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does  not  in  the  least  interfere  with  our  general  inference 
that  the  real  Egyptian  gods  as  a  whole  were  either  ances- 
tral or  totemistic  in  origin. 

From  the  evidence  before  us,  broadly  considered,  we  may 
fairly  conclude,  then,  that  the  earliest  cult  of  Egypt  con- 
sisted of  pure  ancestor-worship,  complicated  by  a  doubt- 
fully religious  element  of  totemism,  which  afterwards  by 
one  means  or  another  interwove  itself  closely  with  the 
whole  ghostly  worship  of  the  country.  The  later  gods 
were  probably  deified  ancestors  of  the  early  tribal  kings, 
sometimes  directly  worshipped  as  mummies,  and  some- 
times perhaps  represented  by  their  totem-animals  or  later 
still  by  human  figures  with  animal  heads.  Almost  every 
one  of  these  great  gods  is  localised  to  a  particular  place — 
"  Lord  of  Abydos,"  "  Mistress  of  Senem,"  "  President  of 
Thebes,"  "  Dweller  at  Hermopolis,"  as  would  naturally  be 
the  case  if  they  were  locally-deified  princes,  admitted  at 
last  into  a  national  pantheon.  In  the  earliest  period  of 
which  any  monuments  remain  to  us,  the  ancestor-worship 
was  purer,  siripler,  and  freer  from  symbolism  or  from  the 
cult  of  the  great  gods  than  at  any  later  time.  With  the 
gradual  evolution  of  the  creed  and  the  pantheon,  however, 
legends  and  myths  increased,  the  syncretic  tendency  mani- 
fested itself  everywhere,  identifications  multiplied,  mysti- 
cism grew  rife,  and  an  esoteric  faith,  with  leanings  towards 
a  vague  pantheistic  monotheism,  endeavoured  to  rational- 
ise and  to  explain  away  the  more  gross  and  foolish  por- 
tions of  the  original  belief.  It  is  the  refinements  and 
glosses  of  this  final  philosophical  stage  that  pass  current 
for  the  most  part  in  systematic  works  as  the  true  doctrines 
of  Egyptian  religion,  and  that  so  many  modern  enquirers 
have  erroneously  treated  as  equivalent  to  the  earliest  pro- 
duct of  native  thought.  The  ideas  as  to  the  unity  of  God, 
and  the  sun-myths  of  Horus,  Isis,  and  Osiris,  are  clearly 
late  developments  or  excrescences  on  the  original  creed, 
and  betray  throughout  the  esoteric  spirit  of  priestly  inter- 
pretation.    To  the  very  last,  the  Worship  of  the  Dead,. 


SUMMARY  OF  EGYPTIAN  RELIGION. 


179 


and  the  crude  polytheism  based  upon  it,  were  the  true 
rehgion  of  the  ancient  Egyptians,  as  we  see  it  expressed 
in  all  the  monuments. 

Such  was  the  religious  world  into  which,  if  we  may  be- 
lieve the  oldest  Semitic  traditions,  the  Sons  of  Israel 
brought  their  God  Jahweh  and  their  other  deities  from  be- 
yond the  Euphrates  at  a  ver>'  remote  period  of  their  na- 
tional history.  And  such,  in  its  fuller  and  more  mystical 
form,  was  the  religion  practised  and  taught  in  Ptolemaic 
and  Roman  Egypt,  at  the  moment  when  the  Christian 
faith  was  just  beginning  to  evolve  itself  round  the  his- 
torical nucleus  of  the  man  Christ  Jesus,  and  him  crucified 


1    I 


R 


180 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


CHAPTER  IX. 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


IM 


>l       !■ 


■■  r 


I 


The  only  people  who  ever  invented  or  evolved  a  pure 
monotheism  at  first  hand  were  the  Jews.  Individual 
thinkers  elsewhere  approached  or  aimed  at  that  ideal  goal, 
like  the  Egyptian  priests  and  the  Greek  philosophers  : 
entire  races  elsewhere  borrowed  monotheism  from  the 
Hebrews,  like  the  Arabs  under  Mohammad,  or,  to  a  less 
extent,  the  Romans  and  the  modern  European  nations, 
when  they  adopted  Christianity  in  its  trinitarian  form  : 
but  no  other  race  ever  succeeded  as  a  whole  in  attaining 
by  their  own  exertions  the  pure  monotheistic  platform, 
however  near  certain  persons  among  them  might  have  ar- 
rived to  such  attainment  in  esoteric  or  mystical  philoso- 
phising. It  is  the  peculiar  glory  of  Israel  to  have  evolved 
God.  And  the  evolution  of  God  from  the  diffuse  gods  of 
the  earlier  Semitic  religion  is  Israel's  great  contribution  to 
the  world's  thought. 

The  sacred  books  of  the  Jews,  as  we  possess  them  in 
garbled  forms  to-day,  assign  this  peculiar  belief  to  the 
very  earliest  ages  of  their  race  :  they  assume  that  Abra- 
ham, the  mythical  common  father  of  all  the  Semitic  tribes, 
was  already  a  monotheist  ;  and  they  even  treat  monothe- 
ism as  at  a  still  remoter  date  the  universal  religion  of  the 
entire  world,  from  which  all  polytheistic  cults  were  but 
a  corruption  and  a  falling  away.  Such  a  belief  is  nowa- 
days, of  course,  wholly  untenable.  So  also  is  the  crude 
notion  that  monotheism  was  smitten  out  at  a  single  blow 
by  the  genius  of   one  individual   man,   Moses,   at   the 


u  r 


THE  HEBREWS  POLYTHEISTS 


l8l 


moment  of  the  Hebrew  exodus  from  Egypt.  The  bare 
idea  that  one  particular  thinker,  just  escaped  from  the 
midst  of  ardent  polytheists,  whose  reUgion  embraced  an 
endless  pantheon  and  a  low  form  of  animal-worship,  could 
possibly  have  invented  a  pure  monotheistic  cult,  is  totally 
opposed  to  every  known  psychological  law  of  human  na- 
ture. The  real  stages  by  which  monotheism  was  evolved 
out  of  a  preceding  polytheism  in  a  single  small  group  of 
Semitic  tribes  have  already  been  well  investigated  by 
Dutch  and  German  scholars  :  all  that  I  propose  to  do  in 
the  present  volume  is  to  reconsider  the  subject  from  our 
broader  anthropological  standpoint,  and  show  how  in  the 
great  Jewish  god  himself  we  may  still  discern,  as  in  a  glass, 
darkly,  the  vague  but  constant  lineaments  of  an  ancestral 
ghost-deity. 

DowaJp.  a  comparatively  late  period  of  Jewish  history, 
a5_we  now_ know* -Jahwfih-wa^  one  and  the  highipst 

amongji^  considerate  divinities  ;  the 

lirst  among  hisjDeers,  like  Zeus,  among  the  gods  of  Hellas, 
Csiris  or  Amen  among  the  gods  of  Egypt,  and  Woden 
or  Thunbr  among  the  gods  of  the  old  Teutonic  pantheon. 
As  late  as  the  century  of  Hezekiah,  the  religion  of  the  great 
mass  of  the  Israelites  and  Jews  was  still  a  broad  th'^ugh 
vague  polytheism.  The  gods  seem  lo  have  been  as  numer- 
ous and  as  localised  as  in  Egypt:  "According  to  the  num- 
ber of  thy  cities  are  thy  gods,  O  Judah,"  says  the  prophet 
Jeremiah  in  the  sixth  century.  It  was  only  by  a  slow 
process  of  syncretism^  by  the  absorption  into  JahweTi- 
worsiiip  of  all  other  conflicting  creeds,^  that  Isra'^l  at  last 
attained  its  full  ideal  of  pure  monotheism.  That  ideal  was 
never  finally  reached  by  the  people  at  large  till  the  return 
from  the  captivity  :  it  had  only  even  been  aimed  at  by  a 
few  ardent  and  exclusive  Jahweh-worshippers  in  the  last 
dangerous  and  doubtful  years  of  national  independence 
which  immediately  preceded  the  Babylonish  exile. 

In  order  to  understand  the  inner  nature  of  this  curious 
gradual  revolution  we  must  look  briefly,  first,  at  the  general 


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182 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL 


character  of  the  old  Hebrew  polytheism  ;  and  secondly, 
at  the  original  cult  of  the  great  ethnical  god  Jahweh  him- 
self. 

In  spite  of  their  long  sojourn  in  Egypt,  the  national 
religion  of  the  Hebrews,  when  we  first  begin  dimly  to 
descry  its  features  through  the  veil  of  later  glosses,  is  re- 
garded by  almost  all  modern  investigators  as  truly  Semitic 
and  local  in  origin.  It  is  usually  described  as  embracing 
three  principal  forms  of  cult  :  the  worship  of  the  teraphim 
or  family  gods  ;  the  worship  of  sacred  stones  ;  and  the 
worship  of  certain  great  gods,  partly  native,  partly  per- 
haps borrowed  ;  some  of  them  adored  in  the  form  of  ani- 
mals, and  some  apparently  elemental  or  solar  in  their 
acquired  attributes.  Although  for  us  these  three  are  one, 
I  shall  examine  them  here  in  that  wonted  order. 

The  cult  of  the  teraphim,  I  think,  we  cannot  consider, 
on  a  broad  anthropological  view,  otherwise  than  as  the 
equivalent  of  all  the  other  family  cults  known  to  us  ;  that 
is  to  say,  in  other  words,  as  pure  unadulterated  domestic 
ancestor-worship.  "  By  that  name,"  says  Kuenen,  "  were 
indicated  larger  or  smaller  images,  which  were  worshipped 
as  household  gods,  and  upon  which  the  happiness  of  the 
family  was  supposed  to  depend."  In  the  legend  of  Jacob's 
flight  from  Laban,  we  are  told  how  Rachel  stole  her 
father's  teraphim  :  and  when  the  angry  chieftain  ovei- 
takes  the  fugitives,  he  enquires  of  them  why  they  have 
robbed  him  of  his  domestic  gods.  Of  Micah,  we  learn 
that  he  made  images  of  his  teraphim,  and  consecrated  one 
of  his  own  sons  to  be  his  family  priest  :  such  a  domestic 
and  private  priesthood  being  exactly  what  we  are  accus- 
tomed to  find  in  the  worship  of  ancestral  manes  every- 
where. Even  through  the  mist  of  the  later  Jehovistic 
recension  we  catch,  in  passing,  frequent  glimpses  of  the 
early  worship  of  these  family  gods,  one  of  which  is  described 
as  belonging  to  Michal,  the  daughter  of  Saul  and  wife  of 
David  ;  while  Hosea  alludes  to  them  as  stocks  of  wood, 
and  Zechariah  as  idols  that  speak  lies  to  the  people.     It  is 


THEIR  ANCESTOR-IVORSHIP.  ig, 

clear  that  the  teraphim  were  preserved  in  each  household 
with  reverential  care,  that  they  were  sacrificed  to  by  the 
family  at  stated  intervals,  and  that  they  were  consulted  on 
all  occasions  of  doubt  or  difficulty  by  a  domestic  priest  clad 
in  an  ephod.  I  think,  then,  if  we  put  these  indications 
side  by  side  with  those  of  family  cults  elsewhere,  we  may 
conclude  that  the  Jewish  religion,  like  all  others,  was 
based  upon  an  iHlTniate  louiT^'fibn  of ^"^^^^ 
worship. 

It  has  been  denied,  indeed,  that  ancestor-worship  pure 
and  simple  ever  existed  among  the  Semitic  races.  A  clear 
contradiction  of  this  denial  is  furnished  by  M.  Lenormant, 
who  comments  thus  on  sepulchral  monuments  from  Ye- 
men :  "  Here,  then,  we  have  twice  repeated  a  whole  series 
of  human  persons,  decidedly  deceased  ancestors  or  rela- 
tions of  the  authors  of  the  dedications.  Their  names  are 
accompanied  with  the  titles  they  bore  during  life.  They 
are  invoked  by  their  descendants  in  the  same  way  as  the 
gods.  They  are  incontestably  deified  persons,  objects  of 
a  family  worship,  and  gods  or  genii  in  the  belief  of  the  peo- 
ple of  their  race."  After  this,  we  need  not  doubt  that  the 
teraphim  were  the  images  of  such  family  gods  or  ancestral 
spirits. 

It  is  not  surprising,  however,  that  these  domestic  gods 
play  but  a  small  part  in  the  history  of  the  people  as  it  has 
come  down  to  us  in  the  late  Jehovistic  version  of  the  He- 
brew traditions.  Nowhere  in  literature,  even  under  the 
most  favourable  circumstances,  do  we  hear  much  of  the 
manes  and  lares,  compared  with-  the  great  gods  of  national 
worship.  Nor  were  such  minor  divinities  likely  to  pro- 
voke the  wrath  even  of  that  "  jealous  god  "  who  later 
usurped  all  the  adoration  of  Israel :  so  that  denunciations 
of  their  votaries  are  comparatively  rare  in  the  rhapsodies 
of  the  prophets.  "  Their  use,"  says  Kuenen,  speaking 
of  the  teraphim,  "  was  very  general,  and  was  by  no  means 
considered  incompatible  with  the  worship  of  Jahweh.** 
They  were  regarded  merely  as  family  affairs,  poor  foemen 


^ 


r 


184 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


r   !' 


I'   \ 


I: 


for  the  great  and  awsome  tribal  god  who  bore  no  rival  near 
his  throne,  and  would  not  suffer  the  pretensions  of  Molech 
or  of  the  Baalim.  To  use  a  modern  analogy,  their  cult 
was  as  little  inconsistent  with  Jahweh-worship  as  a  belief 
in  fairies,  banshees,  or  family  ghosts  was  formerly  in- 
consistent with  a  belief  in  Christianity. 

This  conclusion  will  doubtless  strike  the  reader  at  once 
as  directly  opposed  to  the  oft-repeated  assertion  that  the 
early  Hebrews  had  little  or  no  conception  of  the  life  be- 
yond the  grave  and  of  the  doctrine  of  future  rewards  and 
punishments.  I  am  afraid  it  cannot  be  denied  that  such  is 
the  case.  Hard  as  it  is  to  run  counter  to  so  much  specialist 
opinion,  I  can  scarcely  see  how  any  broad  anthropological 
enquirer  may  deny  to  the  Semites  of  the  tenth  and  twelfth 
centuries  before  Christ  participation  in  an  almost  (or 
quite)  universal  human  belief,  common  to  the  lowest 
savages  and  the  highest  civilisations,  and  particularly  well 
developed  in  that  Egyptian  society  with  which  the  an- 
cestors of  the  Hebrews  had  so  long  rubbed  shoulders. 
The  subject,  however,  is  far  too  large  a  one  for  full  debate 
here.  I  must  content  myself  with  pointing  out  that,  apart 
from  the  a  priori  improbability  of  such  a  conclusion,  the 
Hebrew  documents  themselves  contain  numerous  allu- 
sions, even  in  their  earliest  traditional  fragments,  to  the 
belief  in  ghosts  and  in  the  world  of  shades,  as  well  as  to 
the  probability  of  future  resurrection.  The  habit  of  cave- 
burial  a.  \  of  excavated  grotto-burial  ;  the  importance  at- 
tached to  the  story  of  the  purchase  of  Machpelah  ;  the 
common  phrase  that  such-and-such  a  patriarch  "  was 
gathered  to  his  people,"  or  "  slept  with  his  fathers  "  ;  the 
embalming  of  Joseph,  and  the  carrying  up  of  his  bones 
from  Egypt  to  Palestine  ;  the  episode  of  Saul  and  the 
ghost  of  Samuel  ;  and  indeed  the  entire  conception  of 
Sheol,  the  place  of  the  departed — all  alike  show  that  the 
Hebrew  belief  in  this  respect  did  not  largely  differ  in  es- 
sentials from  the  general  belief  of  surrounding  peoples. 
The  very  frequency  of  allusions  to  witchcraft  and  necro- 


! 


I: 

;  I 

I: 


I'' 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  DEAD. 


185 


mancy  point  in  the  same  direction  ;  while  the  common 
habit  of  assuming  a  priestly  or  sacrificiai  garment,  the 
ephod,  and  then  consuhing  the  family  teraphim  as  a  do- 
mestic oracle,  is  strictly  in  accordance  with  all  that  we 
know  of  the  minor  ancestor-worship  as  it  occurs  elsewhere. 

Closely  connected  with  the  teraphim  is  the  specific 
worship  at  tombs  or  graves.  "  The  whole  north  Semitic 
area,"  says  Professor  Robertson  Smith,  "  was  dotted  over 
with  sacred  tombs,  Memnonia,  Semiramis  mounds,  and 
the  like  ;  and  at  every  such  spot  a  god  or  demigod  had  his 
subterranean  abode."  This,  of  course,  is  pure  ancestor- 
worship.  Traces  of  still  older  cave-burial  are  also  com- 
mon in  the  Hebrew  Scriptures.  "  At  the  present  day," 
says  Professor  Smith,  "  almost  every  sacred  site  in  Pales- 
tine has  its  grotto,  and  that  this  is  no  new  thing  is  plain 
from  the  numerous  symlxjls  of  Astarte-worship  found  on 
the  walls  of  caves  in  Phoenicia.  There  can  be  little  doubt 
that  the  oldest  Phoenician  temples  were  natural  or  arti- 
ficial grottoes." 

We  are  fairly  entitled  to  conclude,  then,  I  believe,  that 
a  domestic  cult  of  the  manes  or  lares,  the  family  dead, 
formed  the  general  substratum  of  early  Hebrew  religion, 
though  as  in  all  other  cases,  owing  to  its  purely  personal 
nature,  this  universal  cult  makes  but  a  small  figure  in  the 
literature  of  the  race,  compared  with  the  worship  of  the 
greater  national  gods  and  goddesses. 

Second  in  the  list  of  worshipful  objects  in  early  Israel 
come  the  sacred  stones,  about  which  I  have  already  :  -d 
a  good  deal  in  the  chapter  devoted  to  that  interesting 
subject,  but  concerning  whose  special  nature  in  the  Se- 
mitic field  a  few  more  words  may  here  be  fitly  added. 

It  is  now  very  generally  admitted  that  ^tone-worship 
played  an  exceedingly  large  and  important  part  in  the 
primitive  Semitic  religion.  How  important  a  part  we 
may  readily  gather  from  many  evidences,  but  from  none 
more  than  from  the  fact  that  even  Mohammad  himself  was 
unable  to  exclude  from  Islam,  the  most  monotheistic  of 


w 


1 86 


THE  GODS  or  ISRAEL. 


)' 


i'  I 


all  known  religious  systems,  the  holy  black  stone  of  the 
Kaaba  at  Mecca.  In  Arabin,  says  Professor  Robertson 
Smith,  the  altar  or  hewn  stone  is  unknown,  and  in  its 
place  we  find  the  rude  pillar  or  the  cairn,  beside  which  the 
sacrificial  victim  is  slain,  the  blood  being  poured  out  over 
the  stone  or  at  its  base.  But  in  Israel,  the  shaped  stone 
seems  the  more  usual  mark  of  the  ghost  or  god.  Such  a 
sacred  stone,  we  have  already  seen,  was  known  to  the  early 
Hebrews  as  a  Beth-el,  that  is  to  say  an  "  abode  of  deity," 
from  the  common  belief  that  it  was  inhabited  by  a  god, 
ghost,  or  spirit.  The  great  prevalence  of  the  cult  of 
stones  among  the  Semites,  however,  is  further  indicated 
by  the  curious  circumstance  that  this  word  was  borrowed 
by  the  Greeks  and  Romans  (in  a  slightly  altered  form)  to 
denote  the  stones  so  supposed  to  be  inhabited  by  deities. 
References  to  such  gods  abound  throughout  the  Hebrew 
books,  though  they  are  sometimes  denounced  as  idola- 
trous images,  and  sometimes  covered  with  a  thin  veneer 
of  Jehovism  by  being  connected  with  the  national  heroes 
and  with  the  later  Jahweh-worship. 

In  the  legend  of  Jacob's  dream  we  get  a  case  where  the 
sacred  stone  is  anointed  and  a  promise  is  made  to  it  of  a 
tenth  of  the  speaker's  substance  as  an  offering.  And 
again,  on  a  later  occasion,  we  learn  that  Jacob  "  set  up  a 
pillar  of  stone,  and  he  poured  a  drink-offering  thereon, 
and  he  poured  oil  thereon;"  just  as,  in  the  great  phallic 
worship  of  the  linga  in  India  (commonly  called  the  linga 
puja),  a  cylindrical  pillar,  rounded  at  the  top,  and  univer- 
sally considered  as  a  phallus  in  its  nature,  is  worshipped  by 
pouring  upon  it  one  of  five  sacred  anointing  liquids,  water, 
milk,  ghee,  oil,  and  wine.  Similar  rites  are  oflfered  in 
many  other  places  to  other  sacred  stones  ;  and  in  many 
cases  the  phallic  value  assigned  to  them  is  clearly  shown 
by  the  fact  that  it  is  usual  for  sterile  women  to  pray  to 
them  for  the  blessing  of  children,  as  Hindu  wives  pray  to 
Mahadeo,  and  as  so  many  Hebrew  women  (to  be  noted 


'I 


!     ' 

v.>. 

^il 

•' 

li 

STONE  GODS  Ii\  PALESTINE 


1S7 


hereafter)  are  mentioned  in  our  texts  as  praying  to 
Jahweh. 

A  brief  catalogue  of  the  chief  stone-deities  alUided  to  in 
Hebrew  literature  may  help  to  enforce  the  importance  of 
the  subject  :  and  it  may  be  noted  in  passing  that  the 
Stones  are  often  mentioned  in  connexion  with  sacred  trees 
— an  association  with  which  we  are  already  familiar.  In 
the  neighbourhood  of  Sichem  was  an  oak — the  "  oak  of 
the  prophets  "  or  "  oak  of  the  soothsayers  " — by  which  lay 
a  stone,  whose  holiness  is  variously  accounted  for  by 
describing  it  as,  in  one  place,  an  altar  of  Abraham,  in  an- 
other an  altar  of  Jacob,  and  in  a  third  a  memorial  of 
Joshua.  But  the  fact  shows  that  it  was  resorted  to  for 
sacrifice,  and  that  oracles  or  responses  were  sought  from  it 
by  its  votaries.  That  is  to  say,  it  was  a  sepulchral  monu- 
ment. Near  Hebron  stood  "the  oak  of  Mamre,"  and 
under  it  a  sacred  stone,  accounted  for  as  an  altar  of  Abra- 
ham, to  which  in  David's  time  sacrifices  were  offered. 
Near  Beersheba  we  find  yet  a  third  tree,  the  tamarisk, 
said  to  have  been  planted  by  Abraham,  and  an  altar  or 
stone  pillar  ascribed  to  Isaac.  In  the  camp  at  Gilgal  were 
*•  the  twelve  stones,"  sometimes,  apparently,  spoken  of  as 
**  the  graven  images,"  but  sometimes  explained  away  as 
memorials  of  Jahweh's  help  at  the  passing  of  the  Jordan. 
Other  examples  are  Ebenezer,  "  the  helpful  stone,"  and 
Tobek  h,  the  "  serpent-stone."  as  11  as  the  "  great 
stone  "  to  which  sacrifices  were  offered  at  Bethshemesh, 
and  the  other  great  stone  at  Gibeon,  which  was  also,  no 
doubt,  an  early  Hebrew  deity. 

So  often  is  the  name  of  Abraham  connected  with  these 
stones,  indeed,  that,  as  some  German  scholars  have  sug- 
gested, Abraham  himself  may  perhaps  be  regarded  as  a 
sacred  boulder,  the  rock  from  which  Israel  originally 
sprang. 

In  any  case,  I  need  hardly  say,  we  must  look  upon  such 
sacred  stones  as  themselves  a  further  evidence  of  ancestor- 
worship  in  Palestine,  on  the  analogy  of  all  similar  stones 


ffj 


■  !' 

i^l 

• 

i 

I 

i88 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


t 

'  1 

if 


1'   f 


.  Il 


!■■ 


elsewhere.  W  may  conclude  that,  as  in  previously  noted 
instances,  they  were  erected  on  the  graves  of  deceased 
chieftains. 

And  now  we  come  to  the  third  and  most  difficult  di- 
vision of  early  Hebrew  religion,  the  cult  of  the  great  gods 
whom  the  jealous  Jahweh  himself  finally  superseded.  The 
personality  of  these  gods  is  very  obscure,  partly  because 
of  the  nature  of  our  materials,  which,  being  derived  en- 
tirely from  Jehovistic  sources,  have  done  their  best  ta 
overshadow  the  "false  gods";  but  partly  also,  I  believe, 
because,  in  the  process  of  evolving  monotheism,  a  syn- 
cretic movement  merged  almost  all  their  united  attributes 
into  Jahweh  himself,  who  thus  becomes  at  last  the  all-ab- 
sorbing synthesis  of  an  entire  pantheon.  Nevertheless, 
we  can  point  out  one  or  two  shadowy  references  to  such 
greater  gods,  either  by  name  alone,  or  by  the  form  under 
which  they  were  usually  worshipped. 

The  scholarship  of  the  elder  generation  would  no  doubt 
have  enumerated  first  among  these  gods  the  familiar 
names  of  Baal  and  Molech.  At  present,  such  an  enume- 
ration is  scarcely  possible.  We  can  no  longer  see  in  the 
Baal  of  the  existing  Hebrew  scriptures  a  single  great  god. 
We  must  regard  the  word  rather  as  a  common  substantive, 
— "  the  lord  "  or  "  the  master," — descriptive  of  the  re- 
lation of  each  distinct  god  to  the  place  he  inhabited.  The 
Baalim,  in  other  words,  seem  to  have  been  the  local  deities 
or  deified  chiefs  of  the  Semitic  region  ;  doubtless  the  dead 
kings  or  founders  of  families,  as  opposed  to  the  lesser  gods 
of  each  particular  household.  It  is  not  improbable,  there- 
fore, that  they  were  really  identified  with  the  sacred  stones 
we  have  just  been  considering,  and  with  the  wooden 
ashera.  The  Baal  is  usually  spoken  of  indefinitely,  with- 
out a  proper  name,  much  as  at  Delos  men  spoke  of  "  the 
God,"  at  Athens  of  "  the  Goddess,"  and  now  at  Padua  of 
"  il  Santo," — meaning  respectively  Apollo,  Athene,  St. 
Antony.  Melcarth  is  thus  the  Baal  of  Tyre,  Astarte  the 
Baalath  of  Byblos  ;    there  was  a  Baal  of  Lebanon,  of 


THE  BAALIM. 


189 


1 


Mount  Hermon,  of  Mount  Peor,  and  so  forth.  A  few 
specific  Baalim  have  their  names  preserved  for  as  in  the 
nomenclature  of  towns  ;  such  are  Baal-tamar,  the  lord  of 
the  palm-tree  ;  with  Baal-gad,  Baal-Berith,  Baal-meon, 
and  Baal-zephon.  But  in  the  Hebrew  scriptures,  as  a 
rule^^^^every  effort  has  been  made  to  blot  out  the  very 
memory  of  tliese"  false  gods,"  and  to  represent  Jahweh 
alone  as  from  the  earliest  period  the  one  true  prince  and 
ruler  in  Israel. 

As  for  Molech,  that  title  merely  means  "the  king"; 
and  it  may  have  been  applied  to  more  than  one  distinct 
deity.  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  does  not  hesitate  to  hold 
that  the  particular  Molech  to  whom  human  sacrifices  of 
children  were  offered  by  the  Jews  before  the  captivity  was 
Jahweh  himself ;  it  was  to  the  national  god.  he  believes, 
that  these  fiery  rites  were  performed  at  the  Tophet  or 
pyre  in  the  ravine  just  below  the  temple. 

We  are  thus  reduced  to  the  most  nebulous  details  about 
these  great  gods  of  the  Hebrews,  other  than  Jahweh,  in  the 
period  preceding  the  Babylonian  captivity.  All  that  is  cer- 
tain appears  to  he.  that  a  considerable  number  of  local  gods 
were  worshipped  here  and  there  at  special  sanctuaries,  each 
of  which  seems  to  have  consisted  of  an  altar  or  stone 
imiage,  standing  under  a  sacred  tree  or  sacred  grove,  and 
combined  wTtKarToj^^ra.  While  the  names  of  Themosh, 
IHe  god  of  MoabTand-Tjf  i3agon,  the  god  of  the  Philistines, 
have  come  down  to  us  with  perfect  frankness  and  clear- 
ness, no  local  Hebrew  god  save  Jahweh  has  left  a  name 
that  can  now  be  discerned  with  any  approach  to  certainty. 
It  should  be  added  that  the  worship  of  many  of  the  gods 
of  surrounding  Semitic  tribes  undoubtedly  extended  from 
the  earliest  tim^smtoTsraeraTso".'^  " 
nTmiist  likewise  premTse^that  the  worship  of  the  Baalim, 
within  and  without  Israel,  was  specially  directed  to  up- 
right conical  stones,  the  most  sacred  objects  at  all  the 
sanctuaries  ;  and  that  these  stones  are  generally  admitted 


>  I 


■  ■  It  ' 
■ ,    f  '    ? 


190 


ri/£  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


to  have  possessed  for  their  worshippers  a  phallic  signifi- 
cance. 

Certain  writers  have  .'urther  endeavoured  to  show  that 
a  few  animal-gods  entered  into  the  early  worship  of  the 
Hebrews.  I  do  not  feel  sure  that  their  arguments  are 
convincing  ;  but  for  the  sake  of  completeness  I  include 
the  two  most  probable  cases  in  this  brief  review  of  the 
vague  and  elusive  deities  of  early  Israel. 

One  of  these  is  the  god  in  the  form  of  a  young  bull, 
specially  worshipped  at  .Dan  and  Bethelj  as  the  bull  Apis 
was  worshipped  at  Memphis,  and  the  bull  Mnevis  at  On 
or  Heliopolis.     This  cult  of  the  bull  is  pushed  back  in  the 
later  traditions  to  the  period  of  the  exodus,  when  the 
Israelites  made  themselves  a  "  ^Mm  calf "  in  the  wilder- 
ness.    Kuenen,  indeed,  lays  stress  upon  the  point  that  this 
Semitic  bull-worship  differed  essentially  from  the  cult  of 
Apis  in  the  fact  that  it  was  directed  to  an  image  or  idol, 
not  to  a  living  animal.     This  is  true,  and  I  certainly  do 
not  wish  to  press  any  particular  connexion  between  Egypt 
and  the  golden  bulls  of  Jei  jboam  in  the  cities  of  Ephraim  : 
though  I  think  too  much  may  perhaps  be  made  of  super- 
ficial differences  and  too  little  of  deep-seated  resemblances 
in  these  matters,  seeing  that  bull-worship  is  a  common 
accompaniment  of  a  phallic  cult  in  the  whole  wide  district 
between  Egypt  and  India.     It  is  the  tendency  of  the 
scholastic  mind,  indeed,  to  over-elaborate  trifles,  and  to 
multiply  to  excess  minute  distinctions.     But  in  any  case, 
we  are  on  comparatively  safe  ground  in  sayis^g^Jhat  abull- 
gpd  was  an  object  of  worship  in^Israel  down  to  a  very  Tale 
period  ;  tliat  Kis'ciirt  "d'^'gcend^    from  an  early  ^age  of  the 
national  existence  ;  and  that  the  chief  seats  of  his  images 
wefe-at^  Dan  and  Bethel  in  Ephraim,  and  at  Beersheba  in 
Judah. 

Was  this  bull-shaped  deity  Jahweh  himself,  or  one  of 
the  polymorphic  forms  of  Jahweh  ?  Such  is  the  opinion 
of  Kuenen,  who  says  explicitly,  "  Jahweh  was  worshipped 
in  the  shape  of  a  young  bull.     It  cannot  be  doubted  that 


THE  HEBREW  BULL-GOD. 


191 


the  cult  of  the  bull-calf  was  really  the  cult  of  Jahweh  in 
person."  And  certainly  in  the  prophetic  writings  of  the 
eighth  century,  we  can  clearly  descry  that  the  worshippers 
of  the  bull  regarded  themselves  as  worshipping  the  god 
Jahweh,  who  brought  up  his  people  from  the  land  of 
Egypt.  Nevertheless,  dangerous  as  it  may  seem  for  an 
outsider  to  differ  on  such  a  subject  from  great  Semitic 
scholars,  I  venture  to  think  we  may  see  reason  hereafter 
to  conclude  that  this  was  not  originally  the  case  :  that  the 
god  worshipped  under  the  form  of  the  bull-calf  was  some 
other  deity,  like  the  Molech  whom  we  know  to  have  been 
represented  with  a  bull's  head  ;  and  that  only  by  the  later 
syncretic  process  did  this  bull-god  come  to  be  identified 
in  the  end  with  Jahweh,  a  deity  (as  seems  likely)  of  quite 
different  origin,  much  as  Mnevis  came  to  be  regarded  at 
Heliopolis  as  an  incarnation  of  Ra,  and  as  Apis  came  to 
be  regarded  at  Memphis  as  an  avatar  of  Ptah  and  still 
later  of  Osiris.  On  the  other  hand,  we  must  remember 
that,  as  Mr.  Frazer  has  shown,  a  sacred  animal  is  often 
held  to  be  the  representative  and  embodiment  of  the  very 
god  to  whom  it  is  habitually  sacrificed.  Here  again  we 
trench  on  ground  which  can  only  satisfactorily  be  occu- 
pied at  a  later  stage  of  our  polymorphic  argument. 

A  second  animal-god,  apparently,  also  adored  in  the 
form  of  a  meEaTrntaqger^was  tlieis^  known  in  our 

version  as  "  ihe  brazen  serpent,"  and  connected  by  the 
Jehovistic  editors  of  the  "eaBier  traditions  with  Moses  in 
the  wilderness.  The  name  of  this  deity  is  given  us  in 
the  Book  of  Kings  as  Nehushtan,  "  the  brass  god  ";  but 
whether  this  was  really  its  proper  designation  or  a  mere 
contemptuous  descriptive  title  we  can  hardly  be  certain. 
The  worship  of  the  serpent  is  said  to  have  gone  on  un- 
interruptedly till  the  days  of  Hezekiah,  v/hen,  under  the 
influence  of  the  exclusive  devotion  to  Jahweh  which  was 
then  becoming  popular,  the  image  was  broken  in  pieces 
as  an  idolatrous  object.  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  point 
out  in  passing  that  the  asp  v/as  one  of  the  most  sacred 


■■ 


192 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL 


i     :      S 


'  1 


animals  in  Egypt  :  but,  as  in  the  case  of  the  bull,  the  snake 
was  also  a  widespread  object  of  worship  throughout  all 
the  surrounding  countries  ;  and  it  is  therefore  probable 
that  the  Hebrew  snake-worship  may  have  been  parallel 
to,  rather  than  derived  from,  Egyptian  ophiolatry. 

Such,  then,  seen  through  the  dim  veil  of  Jehovism,  are 
the  misty  features  of  that  uncertain  pantheon  in  which, 
about  the  eighth  century  at  least,  Jahweh  found  himself 
the  most  important  deity.  The  most  important,  I  say, 
because  it  is  clear  from  our  records  that  for  many  ages 
the  worship  of  Jahweh  and  the  worship  of  the  Baalim 
went  on  side  by  side  without  conscious  rivalry. 

And  what  sort  of  god  was  this  holy  Jahweh  himself, 
whom  the  Hebrews  recognised  from  a  very  early  time  as 
emphatically  and  above  all  others  "  the  God  of  Israel  "  ? 

If  ever  he  was  envisaged  as  a  golden  bull,  if  ever  he  was 
regarded  as  the  god  of  light,  fire,  or  the  sun,  those  con- 
cepts, I  believe,  must  have  been  the  result  of  a  late  trans- 
ference of  attributes  and  confusion  of  persons,  such  as  we 
may  see  so  rife  in  the  more  recent  mystical  religion  of 
Egypt.  What  in  his  own  nature  Jahweh  must  have  been 
in  the  earliest  days  of  his  nascent  godhe<*,'  I  believe  we 
can  best  judge  by  putting  together  some  of  the  passages 
in  old  traditionary  legend  which  bear  most  plainly  upon 
his  character  and  functions. 

In  the  legendary  account  of  the  earliest  dealings  of 
Jahweh  with  the  Hebrew  race,  we  are  told  that  the  ethni- 
cal god  appeared  to  Abraham  in  Haran,  and  promised  to 
make  of  him  "  a  great  nation."  Later  on,  Abraham  com- 
plains of  the  want  of  an  heir,  saying  to  Jahweh,  "  Thou 
hast  given  me  no  seed."  Then  Jahweh  "brought  him  forth 
abroad,  and  said,  Look  now  toward  heaven  and  tell  the 
stars  :  so  shall  thy  seed  be."  Over  and  over  again  we  get 
similar  promises  of  fruitfulness  made  to  Abraham  :  "  I  will 
multiply  thee  exceedingly  " ;  "  thou  shalt  be  a  father  of 
many  nations";  "I  will  make  thee  exceeding  fruitful"; 
"kings  shall  come  out  of  thee";  "for  a  father  of  many 


'  ! 
1: 

I.      1 

;ii: 

Rk 

k. 

THE  NATURE  OF  JAHWEH. 


193 


!f,i 


J 


nations  have  I  made  thee."  So,  too,  of  Sarah  :  "  she 
shall  be  a  mother  of  nations  ;  kings  of  people  shall  be  of 
her."  And  of  Ishmael :  "  I  have  blessed  him  and  will  make 
him  fruitful,  and  will  multiply  him  exceedingly  :  twelve 
princes  shall  he  beget,  and  I  will  make  him  a  great  nation." 
Time  after  time  these  blessings  rectir  for  Abraham,  Isaac, 
and  all  his  family  :  "  I  will  multiply  thy  seed  as  the  stars 
of  the  heaven,  and  as  the  sand  which  is  upon  the  seashore, 
and  thy  seed  shall  possess  the  gate  of  his  enemies." 

In  every  one  of  these  passages,  and  in  many  more  which 
need  not  be  quoted,  but  which  will  readily  occur  to  every 
reader,  Jahweh  is  represented  especially  as  a  god  of  in- 
crease, of  generation,  of  populousness,  of  fertility. 

As  such,  too,  we  find  him  frequently  and  markedly  wor- 
shipped on  special  occasions.     He  was  the  god  to  whom 
sterile  women  prayed,  and  from  whom  they  expected  the 
special  blessing  of  a  son,  to  keep  up  the  cult  of  the  family 
ancestors.     This  trait  survived  even  into  the  poetry  of  the 
latest  period.     "  He  maketh  the  barrren  woman  to  keep 
house,"  says  a  psalmist  about  Jahweh,  "  and  to  be  a  joyful 
mother  of  children."     And  from  the  beginning  to  the  end 
of  Hebrew  legend  we  find  a  similar  characteristic  of  the 
ethnical  god  amply  vindicated.    When  Sarah  is  old  and 
well  stricken  in  years,  Jahweh  visits  her  and  she  conceives 
Isaac.    Then  Isaac  in  turn  "  intreated  Jahweh  for  his  wife, 
because  she  was  barren  ;  and  Jahweh  was  intreated  of 
him,  and  Rebekah  his  wife  conceived."     Again,  "  when 
Jahweh  saw  that  Leah  was  hated,  he  opened  her  womb  ; 
but  Rachel  was  barren."     Once  more,  of  the  birth  of 
Samson  we  are  told  that  Manoah's  wife   "  was  barren 
and  bare  not  " :    but  "  the  angel  of  Jahweh  appeared  unto 
the  woman  and  said  unto  her,  Behold,  now  thou  art  barren 
and  bearest  not  ;  but  thou  shalt  conceive  and  bear  a  son." 
And  of  Hannah  we  are  told,  even  more  significantly,  that 
Jahweh  had  "  shut  up  her  womb."     At  the  shrine  of  Jah- 
weh at  Shiloh,  therefore,  she  prayed  to  Jahweh  that  this 
disgrace  might  be  removed  from  her  and  that  a  child 


194 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL 


\h 


i ,, 


:  ,1  I 


i 


'■  I 


H 


;  I 


might  be  born  to  her.  If  she  bore  "  a  man  child,"  she 
would  offer  him  up  all  his  life  long  as  an  anchorite  to 
Jahweh,  to  be  a  Nazarite  of  the  Lord,  an  ascetic  and  a 
fanatic.  "Jahweh  remembered  her,"  and  she  bore 
Samuel.  And  after  that  again,  "Jahweh  visited  Hannah, 
so  that  she  conceived  and  bare  three  sons  and  two 
daughters."  In  many  other  passages  we  get  the  self-same 
(trait  :  Jahweh  is  regarded  above  everything  as  a  god  of 
\increase  and  a  giver  of  offspring.  "  Children  are  a  heri- 
tage from  Jahweh,"  says  the  much  later  author  of  a  fa- 
miliar ode  :  "  the  fruit  of  the  womb  are  a  reward  from 
him." 

It  is  clear,  too,  that  this  desire  for  children,  for  a  power- 
ful clan,  for  the  increase  of  the  people,  was  a  dominant 
one  everywhere  in  Ephraim  and  in  Judah.  "Thy  wife 
shall  be  as  a  fruitful  vine,"  says  Jahweh  to  his  votary  by 
the  mouth  of  the  poet  ;  "  thy  children  like  olive  plants 
round  about  thy  table."  "  Happy  is  the  man  that  hath 
his  quiver  full  of  them,"  says  another  psalmist  ;  "  they 
shall  speak  with  the  enemies  in  the  gate."  Again  and 
again  the  promise  is  repeated  that  the  seed  of  Abraham 
or  of  Joseph  or  of  Ishmael  shall  be  numerous  as  the  stars 
of  heaven  or  the  sands  of  the  sea  :  Jahweh's  chief  preroga- 
tive is  evidently  the  gift  of  increase,  extended  often  to 
cattle  and  asses,  but  always  including  at  least  sons  and 
daughters.  If  Israel  obeys  Jahweh,  says  the  Deuterono- 
mist,  "  Jahweh  will  make  thee  plenteous  for  good  in  the 
fruit  of  thy  belly,  and  in  the  fruit  of  thy  cattle,  and  in  the 
fruit  of  thy  ground  " :  but  if  otherwise,  then  "  cursed  shall 
be  the  fruit  of  thy  body,  and  the  fruit  of  thy  land,  the  in- 
crease oi  thy  kine,  and  the  flocks  of  thy  sheep." 

Now,  elsewhere  throughout  the  world  we  find  in  like 
manner  a  certain  class  of  phallic  gods  who  are  specially 
conceived  as  givers  of  fertility,  and  to  whom  prayers  and 
offerings  are  made  by  barren  women  who  desire  children. 
And  the  point  to  observe  is  that  these  gods  are  usually 
(perhaps  one  might  even  say  always)  embodied  in  stone 


■  '-  ';'i  f 


A  GOD  OF  INCREASE. 


195 


pillars  or  upright  monoliths.  The  practical  great  god  of 
India — the  god  whom  the  people  really  worsbip^is  Ma- 
hadeo  ;  and  Mahadeo  is,  as  we  know,  a  cylinder  of  stone, 
to  whom  the  linga  puja  is  performed,  and  to  whom  barren 
women  pray  for  offspring.  There  are  sacred  stones  in 
western  Europe,  now  crowned  by  a  cross,  at  which  barren 
women  still  pray  to  God  and  the  Madonna,  or  to  some 
local  saint,  for  the  blessing  of  children.  It  is  allowed  that 
while  the  obelisk  is  from  one  point  of  view  (in  later  theory) 
a  ray  of  the  sun,  it  is  from  another  point  of  view  (in  earlier 
origin)  a  "  symbol  of  the  generative  power  of  nature," 
— which  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that  it  is  an  an- 
cestral stone  of  phallic  virtue.  In  short,  without  laying 
too  much  stress  upon  the  connexion,  we  may  conclude 
generally  that  vhe  upright  pillar  came  early  to  be  re- 
garded,not  merely  as  a  memento  of  the  dead  and  an  abode 
of  the  ghost  or  indwelling  god,  but  also  in  some  mysterious 
and  esoteric  way  as  a  representative  of  the  male  and  gen' 
erative  principle.  ^ 

If  we  recollect  that  the  stone  pillar  was  often  identified 
with  the  ancestor  or  father,  the  reason  for  this  idea  will 
not  perhaps  be  quite  so  hard  to  understand.  "  From 
these  stones  we  are  all  descended,"  thinks  the  primitive 
worshipper  :  "  these  are  our  fathers  ;  therefore,  they  are 
the  givers  of  children,  the  producers  and  begetters  of  all 
our  generations,  the  principle  of  fertility,  the  proper  gods 
to  whom  to  pray  for  offspring."  Add  that  many  of  them, 
being  represented  as  human,  or  human  in  their  upper 
part  at  least,  grow  in  time  to  be  ithyphallic,  like  Priapus, 
party  by  mere  grotesque  barbarism,  but  partly  also  as 
a  sign  of  the  sex  of  the  deceased  :  and  we  can  see  the 
naturalness  of  this  easy  transition.  Frotn  the  Hermae 
of  the  Greeks  to  the  rude  phallic  deities  of  so  many  ex- 
isting savage  races,  we  get  everywhere  signs  of  this  con- 
stant connexion  between  the  sacred  stone  and  the  idea 
of  paternity.  Where  the  stone  represents  the  grave  of  a 
woman,  the  deity  of  course  is  conceived  as  a  goddess,  but 


r 


; 


II    •     ;* 


;  i 


I  u  t 


)  { 


i;  i: 
f.-X 


I   |i ;  -i' 


196 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


with  the  same  implications.  Herodotus  saw  in  Syria  stelae 
engraved  with  the  female  pudenda.  The  upright  stone 
god  is  thus  everywhere  and  always  liable  to  be  regarded 
as  a  god  of  fruitfulness. 

But  did  this  idea  of  the  stone  pillar  extend  to  Palestine 
and  to  the  Semitic  nations  ?  There  is  evidence  that  it  did, 
besides  that  of  Herodotus.  Major  Conder,  whose  opinion 
on  all  questions  of  pure  archaeology  (as  opposed  to  phi- 
lology) deserves  the  highest  respect,  says  of  Canaanitish 
times,  "  The  menhir,  or  conical  stone,  was  the  emblem 
throughout  Syria  of  the  gods  presiding  over  fertility,  and 
the  cup  hollows  which  have  been  formed  in  menhirs 
and  dolmens  are  the  indications  of  libations,  often  of  hu- 
man blood,  once  poured  on  these  stones  by  early  wor- 
shippers." He  connects  these  monuments  with  the  linga 
cult  of  India,  and  adds  that  Dr.  Chaplin  has  found  such  a 
cult  still  surviving  near  the  Sea  of  Galilee.  Lucian  speaks 
of  the  two  great  pillars  at  the  temple  of  Hierapolis  as 
phalli.  Of  the  Phoenicians  Major  Conder  writes  :  "  The 
chief  emblem  worshipped  in  the  temples  was  a  pillar  or 
cone,  derived  no  doubt  from  the  rude  menhirs  wh:  h.  were 
worshipped  by  early  savage  tribes,  such  as  Dravidians, 
Arabs,  Celts,  and  Hottentots."  That  they  were  originally 
sepulchral  in  character  we  can  gather  from  the  fact  that 
"  they  often  stood  beneath  trilithons  or  dolmens,  or  v/ere 
placed  before  an  altar  made  by  a  stone  laid  flat  on  an  up- 
right base."  "  The  representations  on  early  Babylonian 
cylinders  of  tables  whereon  a  small  fire  might  be  kindled, 
or  an  offering  of  some  small  object  laid,  seem  to  indicate 
a  derivation  from  similar  structures.  The  original  temple 
in  which  the  cone  and  its  shrine,  or  its  altar,  were  placed, 
was  but  a  cromlech  or  enclosure,  square  or  round,  made 
by  setting  up  stones."  Remains  of  such  enclosures,  with 
dolmens  on  one  side,  are  found  at  various  spots  in  Moab 
and  Phoenicia.  Nothing  could  be  more  obviously  sepul- 
chral in  character  than  these  rude  shrines  or  Gilgals,  with 
the  pillar  or  gravestone,  from  which,  as  Major  Conder 


i 


SURVIVALS  IN  LITERATURE. 


197 


suggests,  the  hypaethral  temples  of  Byblos  and  Baalbek 
are  finally  developed. 

That  Jahweh  himself  in  his  earliest  form  was  such  a 
stone  god,  the  evidence,  I  think,  though  not  perhaps  ex- 
actly conclusive,  is  to  say  the  least  extremely  suggestive. 
I  have  already  called  attention  to  it  in  a  previous  chapter, 
and  need  not  here  recapitulate  it  in  full  ;  but  a  few  stray 
additions  may  not  be  without  value.     Besides  the  general 
probability,  among  a  race  whose  gods  were  so  almost  uni- 
versally represented  by  sacred  stones,  that  any  particular 
god,  unless  the  contrary  be  proved,  was  so  represented, 
there  is  the  evidence  of  all  the  later  language,  and  of  the 
poems  written  after  the  actual  stone  god  himself  had  per- 
ished, that  Jahweh  was  still  popularly  regarded  as,  at  least  j; 
in  a  metaphorical  sense,  a  stone  or  rock.     "  He  is  the  ^ 
Rock,"  says  the  Deuteronomist,  in  the  song  put  into  the 
mouth  of  Moses  ;  "  I  will  publish  the  name  of  Jahweh  ; 
ascribe  greatness  unto  our  god."     "  Jahweh  liveth,  and 
blessed  be  my  rock,"  says  the  hymn  which  a  later  writer 
composes  for  David  in  the  Second  Book  of  Samuel  :  "  ex- 
alted be  the  god  of  the  rock  of  my  salvation."     And  in  the 
psalms  the  image  recurs  again  and  again  :  "  Jahweh  is  my 
rock  and  my  fortress  "  ;  "  Who  is  a  god  save  Jahweh, 
and  who  is  a  rock  save  our  god  ?  "  ;  "  He  set  my  feet  upon 
a  rock,  and  established  my  goings  "  ;  "  Lead  me  to  the 
rock  that  is  greater  than  I  "  ;  "  Jahweh  is  my  defence,  and 
my  god  is  the  rock  of  my  refuge  "  ;  "  O  come,  let  us  sing 
to  Jahweh  ;  let  us  make  a  joyful  noise  to  the  rock  of  our 
salvation."     And  that  the  shape  of  this  stone  was  probably 
that  of  a  rounded  pillar,  bevelled  at  the  top,  we  see  in  the 
fact  that  later  ages  pictured  to  themselves  their  trans- 
figured Jahweh  as  leading  the  Sons  of  Israel  in  the  wilder- 
ness as  a  pillar  of  fire  by  night  and  a  pillar  of  cloud  by 
daytime. 

The  earlier  Israelites,  however,  had  no  such  poetical 
illusions.  To  them,  their  god  Jahweh  was  simply  the  ob- 
ject— stone  pillar  or  otherwise — preserved  in  the  ark  or 


198 


THE  GODS  or  ISRAEL 


u 


chest  which  long  rested  at  Shiloh,  and  which  was  after- 
wards enshrined,  "  between  the  thighs  of  the  building  " 
(as  a  later  gloss  has  it),  in  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem.  The 
whole  of  the  early  traditions  embedded  in  the  books  of 
Judges,  Samuel,  and  Kings  show  us  quite  clearly  that 
Jahweh  himself  was  then  regarded  as  inhabiting  the  ark, 
and  as  carried  about  with  it  from  place  to  place  in  all  its 
wanderings.  The  story  of  the  battle  with  the  Philistines 
at  Eben-ezer,  the  fall  of  Dagon  before  the  rival  god,  the 
fortunes  of  the  ark  after  its  return  to  the  Israelitish  peo- 
ple, the  removal  to  Jerusalem  by  David,  the  final  enthrone- 
ment by  Solomon,  all  distinctly  show  that  Jahweh  in  per- 
son dwelt  within  the  ark,  between  the  guardian  cherubim. 
"  Who  is  able  to  stand  before  the  face  of  Jahweh,  this  very 
sacred  god  ?  "  ask  the  men  of  Bethshemesh,  when  they 
ventured  to  look  inside  that  hallowed  abode,  and  were 
smitten  down  by  the  "  jealous  god  "  who  loved  to  live  in 
the  darkness  of  the  inmost  sanctuary.* 

It  may  be  well  to  note  in  this  connexion  two  significant 
facts  :  Just,  such  an  ark  was  used  in  Egypt  to  contain  the 
sacred  objects  or  images  of  the  gods.  And  further,  at  the 
period  when  the  Sons  of  Israel  were  tributaries  in  Egypt, 
a  Theban  dynasty  ruled  the  country,  and  the  worship  of 
the  great  Theban  phallic  deity,  Khem,  was  widely  spread 
throughout  every  part  of  the  Egyptian  dominions. 

Is  there,  however,  any  evidence  of  a  linga  or  other  stone 
pillar  being  ever  thus  enshrined  and  entempled  as  the  great 
god  of  a  sanctuary  ?  Clearly,  Major  Conder  has  already 
supplied  some,  and  more  is  forthcoming  from  various 
other  sources.  The  cone  which  represented  Aphrodite 
in  Cyprus  was  similarly  enshrined  as  the  chief  object  of  a 
temple,  as  were  the  stelae  of  all  Egyptian  mummies. 
"  The  trilithon,"  says  Major  Conder,  "  becomes  later  a 
shrine,  in  which  the  cone  or  a  statue  stands."    The  signi- 


:%m 


I 


*  Mr.  William  Simpson  has  some  excellent  remarks  on  the  analogies 
of  the  Egyptian  and  Hebrew  arks  and  sanctuaries  in  his  pamphlet  on 
TAe  Worship  of  Death. 


HUMAN  SACRIFICES  TO  JAHIVEH. 


199 


ficance  of  this  correlation  will  at  once  be  seen  if  the  reader 
remembers  how,  in  the  chapter  on  Sacred  Stones,  I 
showed  the  origin  of  the  idol  from  the  primitive  menhir 
or  upright  pillar.  "The  Khonds  and  other  non-Aryan 
tribes  in  India,"  says  Conder  once  more,  *'  baild  such  tem- 
ples of  rude  stones,  daubed  with  red, — a  survival  of  the 
old  practice  of  anointing  the  menhirs  and  the  sacred  cone 
or  pillar  with  blood  of  victims,  sometimes  apparently  hu- 
man. Among  the  Indians,  the  pillar  is  a  lingam,  and  such 
apparently  was  its  meaning  among  the  Phoenicians." 
And  in  the  Greek  cities  we  know  from  Pausanias  that  an 
unhewn  stone  was  similarly  enshrined  in  the  most  magni- 
ficent adytum  of  the  noblest  Hellenic  temples.  In  fact, 
it  was  rather  the  rule  than  otherwise  that  a  stone  was  the 
chief  object  of  worship  in  <^he  noblest  fanes. 

One  more  curious  trait  must  be  noted  in  the  worship 
of  Jahweh.  Not  only  did  he  rejoice  in  human  sacrifices,^ 
but  he  also  demanded  especially  an  offering  of  the  first-1 
born,  and  he  required  a  singular  and  significant  ransom 
frcm  every  man-child  whom  he  permitted  to  live  among 
his  peculiar  votaries.  On  the  fact  of  human  sacrifices  I 
need  hardly  insist  :  they  were  in  integral  part  of  all  Se- 
mitic worship,  and  their  occurrence  in  the  cult  of  Jahweh 
has  been  universally  allowed  by  all  unprejudiced  scholars. 
The  cases  of  Agag,  whom  Samuel  hewed  to  pieces  before 
the  face  of  Jahweh,  and  of  Jephthah's  daughter,  whom  her 
father  oflfered  up  as  a  thank-offering  for  his  victory,  though 
not  of  course  strictly  historical  from  a  critical  point  of 
view,  are  quite  sufficient  evidence  to  show  the  temper  and 
the  habit  of  the  Jahweh-worshippers  who  described  them. 
So  with  the  legend  of  the  offering  of  Isaac,  who  is  merely 
rescued  at  the  last  moment  in  order  that  the  god  of  gen- 
eration may  make  him  the  father  of  many  thousands. 
Again,  David  seeks  to  pacify  the  anger  of  Jahweh  by  a 
sacrifice  of  seven  of  the  sons  of  Saul.  And  the  prophet 
Micah  asks,  "  Shall  I  give  my  first-bom  for  my  transgres- 
sion, the  fruit  of  my  body  for  the  sin  of  my  soul  ?  " — a  pas- 


200 


THE  GODS  OF  ISRAEL 


ml 

pdj 

■    i           '          1 

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\^1 


!'  t 


?  I 


sage  which  undoubtedly  implies  that  in  Micah's  time  such 
a  sacrifice  of  the  eldest  child  was  a  common  incident  of 
current  Jahweh-worship. 

From  human  sacrifice  to  circumcisi.  n  the  transition  is 
less  violent  than  would  at  first  sight  appear.  An  inter- 
mediate type  is  found  in  the  dedication  of  the  first-born, 
where  Jahweh  seems  to  claim  for  himself,  not  as  a  victim, 
but  as  a  slave  and  devotee,  the  first  fruits  of  that  increase 
which  it  is  his  peculiar  function  to  'insure.  In  various 
laws,  Jahweh  lays  claim  to  the  first-born  of  man  and  beast, 
— sometimes  to  all,  sometimes  only  to  the  male  first-bom. 
The  animals  were  sacrificed;  the  sons,  in  later  ages  at  least, 
were  either  made  over  as  Nazarites  or  redeemed  with  an 
offering  or  a  money-ransom.  But  we  cannot  doubt  that 
in  the  earliest  times  the  first-born  child  was  slain  before 
Jahweh.  In  the  curious  legend  of  Moses  and  Zipporah 
we  get  a  strange  folk-tale  connecting  this  custom  indi- 
rectly with  the  practice  of  circumcision.  Jahweh  seeks  to 
kill  Moses,  apparently  because  he  has  not  offered  up  his 
child  :  but  Zipporah  his  wife  takes  a  stone  knife,  circum- 
cises her  son,  and  flings  the  bloody  offering  at  Jahweh's 
feet,  who  thereupon  lets  her  husband  go.  This,  rather 
than  the  later  account  of  its  institution  by  Abraham,  seems 
the  true  old  explanatory  legend  of  the  origin  of  circum- 
cision— a  legend  analogous  to  those  which  we  find  in 
Roman  and  other  early  history  as  embodying  or  explain- 
ing certain  ancient  customs  or  legal  formulze.  Circum- 
cision, in  fact,  appears  to  be  a  bloody  sacrifice  to  Jahweh, 
as  the  god  of  generation  :  a  sacrifice  essentially  of  the  na- 
ture of  a  ransom,  and  therefore  comparable  to  all  those 
other  bodily  mutilations  whose  origin  Mr.  Herbert 
Spencer  has  so  well  shown  in  the  Ceremonial  Institutions. 

At  the  same  time,  the  nature  of  the  offering  helps  to 
( cast  light  upon  the  character  of  Jahweh  as  a  god  of  in- 
1  crease  ;  exactly  as  the  "  emerods  "  with  which  the  Philis- 
^  tines  were  afflicted  for  the  capture  of  Jahweh  and  his  ark 


h 


^ 


THE  STONE  IN   THE  ARK. 


201 


show  the  nature  of  the  vengeance  which  might  naturally 
be  expected  from  a  deity  of  generation. 

Last  of  all,  how  is  it  that  later  Hebrew  writers  be- 
lieved the  object  concealed  in  the  ark  to  have  been,  not  a 
phallic  stone,  but  a  copy  of  the  "  Ten  Words  "  which 
Jahweh  was  fabled  to  have  delivered  to  Moses  ?  That 
would  be  difficult  to  decide  :  but  here  at  least  is  an  aperqu 
upon  the  subject  which  1  throw  out  for  what  it  may  be 
worth.  The  later  Hebrews,  when  their  views  of  Jahweh 
had  grown  expanded  and  etherealised,  were  obviously 
ashamed  of  their  old  stone-worship,  if  indeed  they  were 
archaeologists  enough  after  the  captivity  to  know  that  it 
had  ever  really  existed.  What  more  natural,  then,  than 
for  them  to  suppose  that  the  stone  which  they  heard  of 
as  having  been  enclosed  in  the  ark  was  a  copy  of  the  "  Ten 
Words," — the  covenant  of  Jahweh  ?  Hence,  perhaps,  the 
later  substitution  of  the  term,  "  Ark  of  the  Covenant,"  for 
the  older  and  correcter  phrase,  **  Ark  of  Jehweh."  One 
more  suggestion,  still  more  purely  hypothetical.  Cones 
with  pyramidal  heads,  bearing  inscriptions  to  the  deceased, 
were  used  by  the  Phoenicians  for  interments.  It  is  just 
possible  that  the  original  Jahweh  may  have  been  such  an 
ancient  pillar,  covered  with  writings  of  some  earlier  char- 
acter, which  were  interpreted  later  as  the  equivalents  or 
symbols  of  the  "  Ten  Words." 

Putting  all  the  evidence  together,  then,  as  far  as  we  can 
now  recover  it,  and  interpreting  it  on  broad  anthropologi- 
cal lines  by  analogy  from  elsewhere,  I  should  say  the  fol- 
lowing propositions  seem  fairly  probable  : 

The  original  religion  of  Israel  was  a  mixed  polytheism, 
containing  many  various  types  of  gods,  and  based  like  all 
other  religions  upon  domestic  and  tribal  ancestor-worship. 
Some  of  the  gods  were  of  animal  shapes  :  others  were 
more  or  less  vaguely  anthropomorphic.  But  the  majority 
were  worshipped  under  the  form  of  sacred  stones,  trees,  or 
wooden  cones.  The  greater  part  of  these  gods  were  Se- 
mitic in  type,  and  common  to  the  Sons  of  Israel  with  their 


T 


\  i 


I;: 


'i  I  t 


l[ 


202 


THE  CODS  OF  ISRAEL. 


\  <  i| 


neighbours  and  kinsmen.  The  character  of  the  Hebrew 
worship,  however,  apparently  underwent  some  slight 
modification  in  Egypt  ;  or  at  any  rate,  Egyptian  influences 
led  to  the  preference  of  certain  gods  over  others  at  the 
period  of  the  Exodus.  One  god,  in  particular,  Jahweh  by 
name,  seems  to  have  been  almost  peculiar  to  the  Sons  of 
Israel, — their  ethnical  deity,  and  therefore  in  all  proba- 
bility an  early  tribal  ancestor  or  the  stone  representative 
of  such  an  ancestor.  The  legends  are  probably  right  in 
their  implication  that  this  god  was  already  worshipped 
(not  of  course  exclusively)  by  the  Sons  of  Israel  before 
their  stay  in  Egypt ;  they  are  almost  certainly  correct  in 
ascribing  the  great  growth  and  extension  of  his  cult  to  the 
period  of  the  Exodus.  The  Sons  of  Israel,  at  least  from 
the  date  of  the  Exodus  onward,  carried  this  god  or  his 
rude  image  with  them  in  an  ark  or  box  through  all  their 
wanderings.  The  object  so  carried  was  probably  a  coni- 
cal stone  pillar,  which  we  may  conjecture  to  have  been 
the  grave-stone  of  some  deified  ancestor  :  and  of  this  an- 
cestor "Jahweh  "  was  perhaps  either  the  proper  name  or  a 
descriptive  epithet.  Even  if,  as  Colenso  suggests,  the 
name  itself  was  Canaanitish,  and  belonged  already  to  a 
local  god,  its  application  to  the  sacred  stone  of  the  ark 
would  be  merely  another  instance  of  the  common  tendency 
to  identify  the  gods  of  one  race  or  country  with  those  of 
another.  The  stone  itself  was  always  enshrouded  in 
Egyptian  mystery,  and  no  private  person  was  permitted  to 
behold  it.  Sacrifices,  both  human  and  otherwise,  were 
offered  up  to  it,  as  to  the  other  gods,  its  fellows  and  after- 
wards its  hated  rivals.  The  stone,  like  other  sacred  stones 
of  pillar  shape,  was  regarded  as  emblematic  of  the  genera- 
tive power.  Circumcision  was  a  mark  of  devotion  to 
Jahweh,  at  first,  no  doubt,  either  voluntary,  or  performed 
by  way  of  a  ransom,  but  becoming  with  the  growth  and 
exclusiveness  of  Jahweh-worship  a  distinctive  rite  of 
Jahweh's  chosen  people.     (But  other  Semites  also  circum- 


'i  I 


t    ' 


CIRCUMCISION. 


203 


cised  themselves  as  a  blood-offering  to  their  own  more  or 
less  phallic  deities.) 

More  briefly  still,  among  many  Hebrew  gods,  Jahweh 
was  originally  but  a  single  one,  a  tribal  ancestor-god, 
worshipped  in  the  form  of  a  cylindrical  stone,  perhaps  at 
first  a  grave-stone,  and  regarded  as  essentially  a  god  of  i 
increase,  a  special  object  of  veneration  by  childless  women. ' 

From  this  rude  ethnical  divinity,  the  mere  sacred  pillar 
of  a  barbarous  tribe,  was  gradually  developed  the  Lord: 
God  of  later  Judaism  and  of  Christianity — a  power,  eternal, 
omniscient,  almighty,  holy  ;  the  most  ethereal,  the  most, 
sublime,  the  most  superhuman  deity  that  the  brain  of  man 
has  ever  conceived.  By  what  slow  evolutionary  process 
of  syncretism  and  elimination,  of  spiritual  mysticism  and 
national  enthusiasm,  of  ethical  effort  and  imaginative  im- 
pulse that  mighty  God  was  at  last  projected  out  of  so  un- 
promising an  original  it  will  be  the  task  of  our  succeeding 
chapters  to  investigate  and  to  describe. 


;;  1 


204 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM, 


CHAPTER  X. 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


We  have  seen  that  the  Hebrews  were  originally  poly- 
theists,  and  that  their  ethnical  god  Jahweh  seems  to  have 
been  worshipped  by  them  in  early  times  under  tho  material 
form  of  a  cylindrical  stone  pillar.  Or  rather,  to  speak 
more  naturally,  the  object  they  so  worshipped  they  re- 
garded as  a  god,  and  called  Jahweh.  The  question  next 
confronts  us,  how  from  this  humble  beginning  did  Israel 
attain  to  the  pure  monotheism  of  its  later  age  ?  What 
was  there  in  the  position  or  conditions  of  the  Hebrew  race 
which  made  the  later  Jews  reject  all  their  other  gods,  and 
fabricate  out  of  their  early  national  Sacred  Stone  the  most 
sublime,  austere,  and  omnipotent  deity  that  humanity  has 
known  ? 

The  answer,  I  believe,  to  this  pregnant  question  is  partly 
to  be  found  in  a  certain  general  tendency  of  the  Semitic 
mind  ;  partly  in  the  peculiar  political  and  social  state  of 
the  Israelitish  tribes  during  the  ninth,  eighth,  seventh, 
sixth,  and  fifth  centuries  before  the  Christian  era.  Or, 
to  put  the  proposed  solution  of  the  problem,  beforehand, 
in  a  still  simpler  form,  Hebrew  monotheism  was  to  some 
extent  the  result  of  a  syncretic  treatment  of  all  the  gods, 
in  the  course  of  which  the  attributes  and  characters  of 
each  became  merged  in  the  other,  only  the  names  (if  any- 
thing) remaining  distinct  ;  and  to  some  extent  the  result 
of  the  intense  national  patriotism,  of  which  the  ethnical 
god  Jahweh  was  at  once  the  outcome,  the  expression,  and 
the  fondest  hope.     The  belief  that  Jahweh  fought  for 


.1! 


VAGUENESS  OF  SEMITIC  GODS. 


205 


"^  Israel,  and  that  by  tnist  in  Jahweh  alone  could  Israel  hold 
her  own  against  Egypt  and  Assyria,  wildly  fanatical  as  it 
appears  to  us  to-day,  and  utterly  disproved  by  all  the  facts 
of  the  case  as  i\.  ultimately  was,  nevertheless  formed  a 
central  idea  of  the  Hebrew  patriots,  and  resulted  by  slow 
degrees  in  the  firm  establishment  first  of  an  exclusive,  and 
afterwards  of  a  truly  monotheistic  Jahweh-cult. 

It  is  one  of  Ernest  Renan's  brilliant  paradoxes  that  the 
Semitic  mind  is  naturally  monotheistic.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  the  Semitic  mind  has  shown  this  native  tendency  in 
its  first  stages  by  everywhere  evolving  pretty  much  the 
same  polytheistic  pantheon  as  that  evolved  by  every  other 
group  of  human  beings  everywhere.  Nevertheless,  there 
is  perhaps  this  kernel  of  truth  in  Renan's  paradoxical  con- 
tention ;  the  Semites,  more  readily  than  most  other  peo- 
ple, merge  the  features  of  their  deities  one  in  the  other. 
That  is  not,  indeed,  by  any  means  an  exclusive  Semitic 
trait.  We  saw  already,  in  dealing  with  the  Egyptian  re- 
ligion, how  all  the  forms  and  functions  of  the  gods  faded 
at  last  into  an  inextricable  mixture,  an  olla  podiida  of 
divinity,  from  which  it  was  practically  impossible  to  dis- 
entangle with  certainty  the  original  personalities  of  Ra 
and  Tum,  of  Amen  and  Osiris,  of  Neiih  and  Isis,  of  Ptah 
and  Apis.  Even  in  the  relatively  fixed  and  individualised 
pantheon  of  Hellas,  it  occurs  often  enough  that  confusions 
both  of  person  and  prerogative  obscure  the  distinctness 
of  the  various  gods.  Aphrodite  and  Herakles  are  poly- 
morphic in  their  embodiments.  But  in  the  Semitic  re- 
ligions, at  least  in  that  later  stage  where  we  first  come 
across  them,  the  lineaments  of  the  different  deities  are  so 
blurred  and  indefinite  that  hardly  anything  more  than  mere 
names  can  v/ith  certainty  be  recognised.  No  other  gods 
are  so  shadowy  and  so  vague.  The  type  of  this  pantheon 
is  that  dim  figure  of  El-Shaddai,  the  early  and  terrible 
object  of  Hebrew  worship,  of  whose  attributes  and  nature 
we  know  positively  nothing,  but  who  stands  in  the  back- 
ground of  all  Hebrew  thought  as  the  embodiment  of  the 


':! 


:    ■( 


I 


■Vl-: 


I  ■     I 
I 


1; 


206 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


nameless  and  trembling  dread  begotten  on  man's  soul 
by  the  irresistible  and  ruthless  forces  of  nature. 

This  vagueness  and  shadowiness  of  the  Semitic  religious 
conceptions  seems  to  depend  to  some  extent  upon  the 
inartistic  nature  of  the  Semitic  culture.  The  Semite  sel- 
dom carved  the  image  of  his  god.  Roman  observers 
noted  with  surprise  that  the  shrine  of  Carmel  contained 
no  idol.  But  it  depended  also  upon  deep-seated  character- 
istics of  the  Semitic  race.  Melancholy,  contemplative, 
proud,  reserved,  but  strangely  fanciful,  the  Arab  of  to-day 
perhaps  gives  us  the  clue  to  the  inderinite  nature  of  early 
Semitic  religious  thinking.  There  never  was  a  nether  world 
more  ghostly  than  Sheol ;  there  never  were  gods  more 
dimly  awful  than  the  Elohim  who  float  through  the  early 
stories  of  the  Hebrew  mystical  cycle.  Their  very  names 
are  hardly  known  to  tts  :  they  come  to  us  through  the 
veil  of  later  Jehovistic  editing  with  such  merely  descriptive 
titles  as  the  God  of  Abraham,  the  Terror  of  Isaac,  the 
Mighty  Power,  the  Most  High  Deity.  Indeed,  the  true 
Hebrew,  like  many  other  barbarians,  seems  to  ha  /e  shrunk 
either  from  looking  upon  the  actual  form  of  his  god  itself, 
or  from  pronouncing  aloud  his  proper  name.  His  deity 
was  shrouded  in  the  darkness  of  an  ark  or  the  deep  gloom 
of  an  inner  tent  or  sanctuary  ;  the  syllables  that  designated 
the  object  of  his  worship  were  never  uttered  in  full,  save 
on  the  most  solemn  occasions,  but  were  shirked  or  slurred 
over  by  some  descriptive  epithet.  Even  the  unpro- 
nounceable title  of  Jahweh  itself  appears  from  our  docu- 
ments to  have  been  a  later  name  bestowed  during  the 
Exodus  on  an  antique  god  :  while  the  rival  titles  of  the 
Baal  and  the  Molech  mean  nothing  more  than  the  Lord 
and  the  King  respectively.  An  excessive  reverence  for- 
bade the  Semite  to  know  anything  of  his  god's  personal  ap- 
pearance or  true  name,  and  so  left  the  features  of  almost 
all  the  gods  equally  uncertain  and  equally  formless. 

But  besides  the  difficulty  of  accurately  distinguishing 
between  the  forms  and  functions  of  the  different  Semitic 


SIMPLIFICATION  OF  THE  PANTHEON. 


207 


deities  which  even  their  votaries  must  have  felt  from  the 
beginning,  there  was  a  superadded  difficulty  in  the  de- 
veloped creed,  due  to  the  superposition  of  elemental  mysti- 
cism and  nature-worship  upon  the  primitive  cult  of  an- 
cestral ghosts  as  gods  and  goddesses.  Just  as  Ra,  the 
sun,  was  identified  in  the  latest  ages  with  almost  every 
Egyptian  god,  so  solar  ideas  and  solar  myths  affected  at 
last  th»  distinct  personality  of  almost  every  Semitic  deity. 
The  consequence  is  that  all  the  gods  become  in  the  end 
practically  indistinguishable  :  one  is  so  like  the  other  that 
different  interpreters  make  the  most  diverse  identifications, 
and  are  apparently  justified  in  so  doing  (from  the  mytho- 
logical standpoint)  by  the  strong  solar  or  elemental  family 
likeness  which  runs  through  the  whole  pantheon  in  its 
later  stages.  It  has  even  been  doubted  by  scholars  of  the 
older  school  whether  Jahweh  is  not  himself  a  form  of  his 
great  rival  Baal  :  whether  both  were  not  at  bottom 
identical — mere  divergent  shapes  of  one  polyonymous  sun- 
god.  To  us,  who  recognise  in  every  Baal  the  separate 
ghost-god  of  a  distinct  tomb,  such  identification  is  clearly 
impossible. 

To  the  worshippers  of  the  Baalim  or  of  Jahweh  them- 
selves, however,  these  abstruser  mythological  problems 
never  presented  themselves.  The  difference  of  name  and 
of  holy  place  was  quite  enough  for  them,  in  spite  of  es- 
sential identity  of  attribute  or  nature.  They  would  kill 
one  another  for  the  sake  of  a  descriptive  epithet,  or  risk 
death  itself  rather  than  offer  up  sacrifices  at  a  hostile  altar. 

Nevertheless,  various  influences  conspired,  here  as  else- 
where, to  bring  about  a  gradual  movement  of  syncretism 
— that  is  to  say,  of  the  absorption  of  many  distinct  gods 
into  one  ;  the  final  identification  of  several  deities  origi- 
nally separate.  What  those  influences  were  we  must 
now  briefly  consider. 

In  the  first  place,  we  must  recollect  that  while  in  Egypt, 
with  its  dry  and  peculiarly  preservative  climate,  mummies, 
idols,  tombs,  and  temples  might  be  kept  unchanged  and 


H 


i) 


;i; 


V7^ 

i 


if! 


208 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


undestroyed  for  ages,  in  almost  all  other  countries  rain, 
wind,  and  time  are  mighty  levellers  of  human  handicraft. 
Thus,  while  in  Egypt  the  cult  of  the  Dead  Ancestor  sur- 
vives as  such  quite  confessedly  and  openly  for  many  cen- 
turies, in  most  other  countries  the  tenaency  is  for  the 
actual  personal  objects  of  worship  to  be  more  and  more 
forgotten  ;  vague  gods  and  spirits  usurp  by  degrees  the 
place  of  the  historic  man  ;  rites  at  last  cling  rather  to 
sites  than  to  particular  persons.  The  tomb  may  disap- 
pear ;  and  yet  the  sacred  stone  may  be  reverenced  still 
with  the  accustomed  veneration.  The  sacred  stone  may 
go  ;  and  yet  the  sacred  tree  may  be  watered  yearly  with 
the  blood  of  victims.  The  tree  itself  may  die  ;  and  yet  the 
stump  may  continue  to  be  draped  on  its  anniversary  with 
festal  apparel.  The  very  stump  may  decay  ;  and  yet  gifts 
of  food  or  offerings  of  rags  may  be  cast  as  of  old  into  the 
sacred  spring  that  once  welled  beside  it.  The  locality 
thus  grows  to  be  holy  in  itself,  and  gives  us  one  clear  and 
obvious  source  of  later  nature-worship. 

The  gods  or  spirits  who  haunt  such  shrines  come  na- 
turally to  be  thought  of  with  the  lapse  of  ages  as  much 
like  one  another.  Godship  is  all  that  can  long  remain  of 
their  individual  attributes.  Their  very  names  are  often  un- 
known ;  they  are  remembered  merely  as  the  lord  of 
Lebanon,  the  Baal  of  Mount  Peor.  No  wond  *r  that  after 
a  time  they  get  to  be  practically  identified  with  one  an- 
other, while  similar  myths  are  often  fastened  by  posterity 
to  many  of  them  together.  Indeed,  we  know  that  new 
names,  and  even  foreign  intrusive  names,  frequently  take 
the  place  of  the  original  titles,  while  the  god  himself  still 
continues  to  be  worshipped  as  the  same  shapeless  stone, 
with  the  same  prescribed  rites,  in  the  same  squalid  or 
splendid  temples.  Thus,  Melcarth,  the  Baal  of  Tyre,  was 
adored  in  later  days  under  the  Greek  name  of  Herakles  ; 
and  thus  at  Bablos  two  local  deities,  after  being  identified 
first  with  the  Syrian  divinities,  Adonis  and  Astarte,  were 
identified  later  with  the  Egyptian  divinities,  Osiris  and 


SYMBOLISM  A  LATE  ELEMENT. 


209 


Isis.  Yet  the  myths  of  the  place  show  us  that  through 
all  that  time  the  true  worship  was  paid  to  the  dead  stump 
of  a  sacred  tree,  which  was  said  to  have  grown  from  the 
grave  of  a  god — in  other  words,  from  the  tumulus  of  an 
ancient  chieftain.  No  matter  how  greatly  mythologies 
change,  these  local  cults  remain  ever  constant ;  the  sacred 
stones  are  here  described  as  haunted  by  djinns,  and  there 
as  memorials  of  Christian  martyrs  ;  the  holy  wells  are 
dedicated  here  to  nymph  or  hero,  and  receive  offerings 
there  to  saint  or  fairy.  So  the  holy  oaks  of  immemorial 
worship  in  England  become  "  Thor's  oaks  "  under  Saxon 
heathendom,  and  "  Gospel  oaks  "  under  mediaeval  Chris- 
tianity. 

Finally,  in  the  latest  stages  of  worship,  an  attempt  is 
always  made  to  work  in  the  heavenly  bodies  and  the  great 
energies  of  nature  into  the  mythological  groundwork  or 
theory  of  religion.  Every  king  is  the  descendant  of  the 
sun,  and  every  great  god  is  therefore  necessarily  the  sun 
in  person.  Endless  myths  arise  from  these  phrases,  which 
are  mistaken  by  mythologists  for  the  central  facts  and 
sources  of  religion.  But  they  are  nothing  of  the  kind. 
Mysticism  and  symbolism  can  never  be  primitive  ;  they 
are  well-meant  attempts  by  cultivated  religious  thinkers 
of  later  days  to  read  deep-seated  meaning  into  the  crude 
ideas  and  still  cruder  practices  of  traditional  religion.  I 
may  add  that  Dr.  Robertson  Smith's  learned  and  able 
works  are  constantly  spoiled  in  this  way  by  his  dogged 
determination  to  see  r^ture- worship  as  primitive,  where 
it  is  really  derivative,  as  the  earliest  starting-point,  where 
it  is  really  the  highest  and  latest  development. 

Clearly,  when  all  gods  have  come  to  be  more  or  less 
solar  in  their  external  and  acquired  features,  the  process 
of  identification  and  internationalisation  is  proportionately 
easy. 

The  syncretism  thus  brought  about  in  the  Hebrew  re- 
ligion by  the  superposition  of  nature-worship  on  the  primi- 
tive cult  must  have  paved  the  way  for  the  later  recognition 


i '  ' 


ihi 


'  I 


r 


E  < 


210 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


I      I 


i   ! 


i    I 


!■  'M 


n 


H* 


of  monotheism,  exactly  as  we  know  it  did  in  the  esoteric 
creed  of  Egypt,  by  making  all  the  gods  so  much  alike  that 
worshippers  had  only  to  change  the  name  of  their  deity, 
not  the  attributes  of  the  essential  conception.  Let  us 
look  first  how  far  this  syncretism  affected  the  later  idea 
cf  Jahweh,  the  phallic  stone-god  preserved  in  the  ark  ; 
and  then  let  us  enquire  afterward  how  the  patriotic  re- 
action against  Assyrian  aggression  put  the  final  coping- 
stone  on  the  rising  fabric  of  monotheistic  Jahweh-worship, 

It  is  often  asserted  that  Jahweh  was  worshipped  in  many 
places  in  Israel  under  the  form  of  a  golden  calf.  That  is 
to  say,  Hebrews  who  set  up  images  of  a  metal  bull  be- 
lieved themselves  nevertheless  to  be  worshipping  Jahweh. 
Even  the  prophets  of  the  eighth  century  regard  the  cult  of 
the  bull  as  a  form  of  Jahweh-worship,  though  not  a  form 
to  which  they  can  personally  give  their  approbation.  But 
the  bull  is  probably  in  its  origin  a  distinct  god  from  the 
stone  in  the  ark  ;  and  if  its  worship  was  identified  with  that 
of  the  Rock  of  Israel,  it  could  be  only  by  a  late  piece  of 
syncretic  mysticism.  Perhaps  the  link  here,  as  in  the  case 
of  Apis,  was  a  priestly  recognition  of  thebullassymbolisingf 
the  generative  power  of  nature  ;  an  idea  which  would  be 
peculiarly  appropriate  to  the  god  whose  great  function  it 
was  to  encourage  fruitfulness.  But  in  any  case,  we 
cannot  but  see  in  this  later  calf-worship  a  superadded 
element  wholly  distinct  from  the  older  cult  of  the  sacred 
stone,  just  as  the  worship  of  Ra  was  wholly  distinct  in 
origin  from  the  totem-cult  of  Mnevis,  or  as  the  worship 
of  Amen  was  wholly  distinct  from  that  of  Khem  and 
Osiris.  The  stone-god  and  the  bull-god  merge  at  last 
into  one,  much  as  at  a  far  later  date  the  man  Jesus  merges 
into  the  Hebrew  god,  and  receives  more  reverence  in 
modern  faiths  than  the  older  deity  whom  he  practically 
replaces. 

Even  in  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem  itself,  symbols  of  bull- 
worship  were  apparently  admitted.  The  altar  upon  which 
the  daily  sacrifice  was  burnt  had  four  horns  ;  and  the 


< 


11 


A 


LATER  CONCEPTIONS  OF  JAHWEH. 


211 


in 
lly 


he 


laver  in  the  court,  the  "  brazen  sea,"  was  supported  upon 
the  figures  of  twelve  oxen.  When  we  remember  that  the 
Molech  had  the  head  of  a  bull,  we  can  hardly  fail  to  see 
in  these  symbols  a  token  of  that  gradual  syncretism  which 
invariably  affects  all  developed  pantheons  in  all  civilised 
countries. 

Much  more  important  are  the  supposed  signs  of  the 
(Jater  identification  of  Jahweh  with  the  sun,  and  his 
Emergence  as  a  modified  and  transfigured  sun-god.  It 
may  seem  odd  at  first  that  such  a  character  could  ever 
be  acquired  by  a  sacred  stone,  did  we  not  recollect  the 
exactly  similar  history  of  the  Egyptian  obelisk,  which  in 
like  manner  represents,  first  and  foremost,  the  upright 
pillar  or  monolith — that  is  to  say,  the  primitive  gravestone 
— but  secondarily  and  derivatively,  at  once  the  generative 
principle  and  a  ray  of  the  sun.  With  this  luminous 
analogy  to  guide  us  in  our  search,  we  shall  have  little  dif- 
ficulty in  recognising  how  a  solar  character  may  have 
■been  given  to  the  later  attributes  and  descriptions  of 
Jahweh. 

I  do  not  myself  attach  undue  importance  to  these  solar 
characteristics  of  the  fully  evolved  Jahweh  ;  but  so  much 
has  been  made  of  them  by  a  certain  school  of  modern 
thinkers  that  I  must  not  pass  them  over  in  complete 
silence. 

To  his  early  worshippers,  then,  as  we  saw,  Jahweh  was 
merely  the  stone  in  the  ark.  He  dwelt  there  visibly,  and 
where  the  ark  went,  there  Jahweh  went  with  it.  But  the 
later  Hebrews — say  in  the  eighth  century — had  acquired 
a  very  different  idea  of  Jahweh's  dwelling-place.  Astro- 
logical and  solar  ideas  (doubtless  Akkadian  in  origin)  had 
profoundly  modified  their  rude  primitive  conceptions.  To 
Amos  and  to  the  true  Isaiah,  Jahweh  dwells  in  the  open 
sky  above  and  is  "  Jahweh  of  hosts,"  the  leader  among  the 
shining  army  of  heaven,  the  king  of  the  star-world. 
! "  Over  those  celestial  bodies  and  celestial  inhabitants 
Jahweh  rules";  they  surround  him  and  execute  his  com- 


\ 


212 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


■ 


( 


mands  :  the  host  of  heaven  are  his  messengers — in  the 
more  familiar  language  of  our  modern  religion,  "  the 
angels  of  the  Lord,"  the  servants  of  Jahweh.  To  Micah, 
heaven  is  "  the  temple  of  Jahweh's  holiness  "  :  "  God  on 
high,"  is  the  descriptive  phrase  by  which  the  prophet  al- 
ludes to  him.  In  all  this  we  have  reached  a  very  different 
conception  indeed  from  that  of  the  early  and  simple- 
minded  Israelites  who  carried  their  god  with  them  on  an 
ox-cart  from  station  to  station. 

Furthermore,  light  and  fire  are  constantly  regarded  by 
these  later  thinkers  as  manifestations  of  Jahweh  ;  and 
even  in  editing  the  earlier  legends  they  introduce  such 
newer  ideas,  making  "  the  glory  of  Jahweh  "  light  up  the 
ark,  or  appear  in  the  burning  bush,  or  combining  both 
views,  the  elder  and  the  younger,  in  the  pillar  of  fire  that 
preceded  the  nomad  hoide  of  Israel  in  the  wilderness. 
Jahweh  is  said  to  "  send  "  or  to  "  cast  fire  "  from  heaven, 
in  which  expressions  we  see  once  more  the  advanced  con- 
cept of  an  elemental  god,  whose  voice  is  the  thunder,  and 
Nwhose  weapon  the  lightning.  All  these  are  familiar  de- 
velopments of  the  chief  god  in  a  pantheon.  Says  Zecha- 
riah  in  his  poem,  "  Ask  ye  of  Jahweh  rain  in  the  time  of 
the  latter  showers  :  Jahweh  will  male  the  lightnings." 
Says  Isaiah,  "  The  light  of  Israel  shall  be  for  a  fire.  And 
his  holy  one  for  a  flame  ";  "  Behold,  the  name  of  Jahweh 
cometh  from  afar.  His  anger  burneth,  and  violently  the 
smoke  riseth  on  high  :  His  lips  are  full  of  indignation, 
And  his  tongue  is  as  a  devouring  fire."  In  these  and  a 
hundred  other  passages  that  might  be  quoted,  we  seem  to 
see  Jahweh  envisaged  to  a  great  extent  as  a  sun-god,  and 
clothed  in  almost  all  the  attributes  of  a  fiery  Molech. 

Sometimes  these  Molech-traits  come  very  close  indeed 
to  those  of  the  more  generally  acknowledged  fire-gods. 
"  Thus  we  read,"  says  Kuenen,  "  that  *  the  glory  of  Jah- 
weh was  like  devouring  lire  on  the  top  of  Mount  Sinai '; 
and  that  *  his  angel  appeared  in  a  flame  of  fire  out  of  the 
midst  of  a  bush  :  the  bush  burned  with  fire  but  was  not 


i 


ASTROLOGICAL  ADDITIONS. 


213 


>» 


consumed  '  "  So  Jahweh  himself  is  called  "  a  consuming 
fire,  a  jealous  god  "  :  and  a  poet  thus  describes  his  ap- 
pearance, "  Smoke  goeth  up  out  of  his  nostrils,  And  fire 
out  of  his  mouth  devoureth  ;  coals  of  iire  are  kindled  by 
him."  These  are  obviously  very  derivative  and  borrowed 
prerogatives  with  which  to  deck  out  the  primitive  stone 
pillar  that  led  the  people  of  Israel  up  out  of  Egypt.  Yet 
we  know  that  precisely  analogous  evolutions  have  been 
undergone  by  other  stone-gods  elsewhere. 

Once  more,  though  this  is  to  anticipate  a  little,  the  later 
Jahweh-worship  seems  to  have  absorbed  into  itself  certain 
astrological  elements  which  were  originally  quite  alien  to 
it,  belonging  to  the  cult  of  other  gods.  Such  for  example 
is  the  institution  of  the  Sabbath,  the  unlucky  day  of  the 
malign  god  Kewan  or  Saturn,  on  which  it  was  undesirable 
to  do  any  kind  of  work,  and  on  which  accordingly  the 
superstitious  Semite  rested  altogether  from  his  weekly 
labours.  The  division  of  the  lunar  month  (the  sacred 
period  of  Astarte,  the  queen  of  heaven)  into  four  weeks  of 
seven  days  each,  dedicated  in  turn  to  the  gods  of  the  seven 
planets,  belongs  obviously  to  the  same  late  cult  of  the 
elemental  and  astrological  gods,  or,  rather,  of  the  gods 
with  whom  these  heavenly  bodies  were  at  last  identified 
under  Akkadian  influence.  The  earlier  prophets  of  the 
exclusive  Jahweh-worship  denounce  as  idolatrous  such 
observation  of  the  Sabbath  and  the  astrological  feasts — 
"  Your  Sabbaths  and  your  new  moons  are  an  abomination 
to  me";  and  according  to  Amos,  Kewan  himself  had 
been  the  chief  idolatrous  object  of  worship  by  his  country- 
men in  the  wilderness.  Later  on,  however,  the  Jehovistic 
party  found  itself  powerless  to  break  the  current  of  super- 
stition on  the  Sabbath  question,  and  a  new  modus  vivendi 
was  therefore  necessary.  They  arranged  a  prudent  com- 
promise. The  Sabbath  was  adopted  bodily  into  the  mono- 
theistic Jahwen-worship,  and  a  mythical  reason  was  given 
for  its  institution  and  its  sacred  character  which  nominally 
linked  it  on  to  the  cult  of  the  ethnical  god.     On  that  day, 


J 


214 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


said  the  priestly  cosmogonists,  Jahweh  rested  from  his 
labour  of  creation.  In  the  same  way,  many  other  frag- 
ments of  external  cults  were  loosely  attached  to  the 
worship  of  Jahweh  by  a  verbal  connection  with  some  part 
of  the  revised  Jehovistic  legend,  or  else  were  accredited 
to  national  Jehovistic  or  Jehovised  heroes. 

Having  thus  briefly  sketched  out  the  gradual  changes 
which  the  conception  of  Jahweh  himself  underwent  during 
the  ages  when  his  supremacy  was  being  slowly  established 
in  the  confederacy  of  Israel,  let  us  now  hark  back  once 
more  and  attack  the  final  problem,  Why  did  the  particular 
cult  of  Jahweh  become  at  last  exclusive  and  monotheistic  ? 

To  begin  with,  we  must  remember  that  from  the  very 
outset  of  the  national  existence,  Jahweh  was  clearly  re- 
garded on  all  hands  as  the  ethnical  god,  the  special  god 
of  Israel.  The  relation  of  such  ethnical  gods  to  their  peo- 
ple has  been  admirably  worked  out  by  Dr.  Robertson 
Smith  in  The  Religion  of  the  Semites.  Even  though  we 
cannot,  however,  accept  as  historical  the  view  given  us  of 
the  exodus  in  the  Pentateuch,  nor  admit  that  Jahweh 
played  anything  like  so  large  a  part  in  the  great  national 
migration  as  is  there  indicated,  it  is  yet  obvious  that  from 
the  moment  when  Israel  felt  itself  a  nation  at  all,  Jahweh 
was  recognised  as  its  chief  deity.  He  was  the  "  god  of 
Israel,"  just  as  Milcom  was  the  god  of  the  Ammonites, 
Chemosh  the  god  of  Moab,  and  Ashtaroth  the  goddess  of 
Sidon.  As  distinctly  as  every  Athenian,  while  worship- 
ping Zeus  and  Hera  and  Apollo,  held  Athene  to  be  the 
special  patron  of  Athens,  so  did  every  Israelite,  while  wor- 
shipping the  Baalim  and  the  Molech  and  the  local  deities 
generally,  hold  Jahweh  to  be  the  special  patron  of  Israel. 

Moreover,  from  the  very  beginning,  there  is  reason  to 
suppose  that  the  Israelites  regarded  Jahweh  as  their  su- 
preme god.  Most  pantheons  finally  settle  down  into  a 
recognised  hierarchy,  in  which  one  deity  or  another 
gradually  assumes  the  first  place.  So,  in  Hellas,  the  su- 
premacy of  Zeus  was  undoubted  ;  so,  in  Rome,  was  the 


!i 


A       -A 


JAinVEH  THE  PATRIOT  GOD. 


215 


supremacy  of  Jupiter.  Sometimes,  to  be  sure,  as  among 
our  Teutonic  ancestors,  we  see  room  for  doubt  betweea 
two  rival  gods  :  it  would  be  difficult  to  assign  the  exact 
priority  to  either  of  the  two  leading  deities  :  among  the 
English,  Woden  rather  bore  it  over  Thunor  ;  among  the 
Scandinavians,  Thor  rather  bore  it  over  Odin.  In  Israel, 
in  like  manner,  there  was  apparently  a  time  when  the 
Presidency  of  the  Immortals  hovered  between  Jahweh  and 
one  or  other  of  the  local  Baalim.  But  in  the  end,  and  per- 
haps even  from  the  very  beginning,  the  rrififrages  of  the 
people  were  mainly  with  the  sacred  stone  -^f  i'le  ark.  He 
was  the  God  of  Israel,  and  they  were  the  cho£  ^n  people  of 
Jahweh. 

The  custom  of  circumcision  must  have  proved  at  once 
the  symbol  and  in  part  the  cause,  in  part  the  efifect,  of  this 
general  devotion  of  the  people  to  a  single  supreme  god. 
At  first,  no  doubt,  only  the  first-born  or  other  persons  spe- 
cially dedicated  to  Jahweh,  would  undergo  the  rite  which 
marked  them  out  so  clearly  as  the  devotees  of  the  god 
of  fertility.  But  as  time  went  on,  long  before  the  triumph 
of  the  exclusive  Jahweh-worship,  it  would  seem  that  the 
practice  of  offering  up  every  male  child  to  the  national 
god  had  become  universal.  As  early  as  the  shadowy 
reign  of  David,  the  Philistines  are  reproachfully  alluded 
to  in  our  legends  as  "  the  uncircumcised  "  ;  whence  we 
may  perhaps  conclude  (though  the  authority  is  doubtful) 
that  even  then  circumcision  had  become  coextensive  with 
Israelitish  citizenship.  Such  universal  dedication  of  the 
whole  males  of  the  race  to  the  national  god  must  have 
done  much  to  ensure  his  ultimate  triumph. 

If  we  look  at  the  circumstances  of  the  Israelites  in  Pales- 
tine, we  shall  easily  see  how  both  religious  unity  and 
intense  national  patriotism  were  fostered  by  the  very  na- 
ture of  their  tenure  of  the  soil  ;  and  also  why  a  deity 
mainly  envisaged  as  a  god  of  generation  should  have  be- 
come the  most  important  member  of  their  national  pan- 
theon.    Their  position  during  the  first  few  centuries  ol 


l\ 


ill' 


('■:n 


I'!     ■    " 


IS 


i:    ■ 


I* 


A  If 


2l6 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


their  life  in  Lower  Syria  may  be  compared  to  that  of  the 
Dorians  in  Peloponnesus  :  they  were  but  a  little  garrison 
in  a  hostile  land  fighting  incessantly  with  half-conquered 
tributaries  and  encircling  foes  ;  now  hard-pressed  by  re- 
bellions of  their  internal  enemies ;  and  now  again 
rendered  subject  themselves  to  the  hostile  Philistines  on 
their  maritime  border.  The  handful  of  rude  warriors  who 
burst  upon  the  land  under  such  bloodthirsty  leaders  as  the 
mystical  Joshua  could  only  hope  for  success  by  rapid  and 
constant  increase  of  their  numbers,  and  by  avoiding  as 
far  as  possible  those  internal  quarrels  which  were  always 
the  prelude  to  national  disgrace.  To  be  "  a  mother  in 
Israel "  is  the  highest  hope  of  every  Hebrew  woman. 
Hence  it  was  natural  that  a  god  of  generation  should  be- 
come the  chief  among  the  local  deities,  and  that  the 
promise  held  out  by  his  priests  of  indefinite  multiplication 
should  make  him  the  most  popular  and  powerful  member 
of  the  Israelitish  pantheon.  And  though  all  the  stone 
gods  were  probably  phallic,  yet  Jahweh,  as  the  ethnical 
patron,  seems  most  of  all  to  have  been  regarded  as  the 
giver  of  increase  to  Israel. 

It  seems  clear,  too,  that  the  common  worship  of  Jahweh 
was  at  first  the  only  solid  bond  of  union  between  the  scat- 
tered and  discordant  tribes  who  were  afterwards  to  grow 
into  the  Israelitish  people.  This  solidarity  of  god  and 
tribe  has  well  been  insisted  on  by  Professor  Robertson 
Smith  as  a  common  feature  of  all  Semitic  worship.  The 
ark  of  Jahweh  in  its  house  at  Shiloh  appears  to  have 
formed  the  general  meeting-place  for  Hebrew  patriotism, 
as  the  sanctuary  of  Olympia  formed  a  focus  later  for  the 
dawning  sense  of  Hellenic  unity.  The  ark  was  taken  out 
to  carry  before  the  Hebrew  army,  that  the  god  of  Israel 
might  fight  for  his  worshippers.  Evidently,  therefore, 
from  a  very  early  date,  Jahweh  was  regarded  in  a  literal 
sense  as  the  god  of  battles,  the  power  upon  whom  Israel 
might  specially  rely  to  guard  it  against  its  enemies.  When, 
as  the  legends  tell  us,  the  national  unity  was  realised 


EXCLUSIVENESS  OF  JAHWEH-WORSHIP. 


217 


under  David  ;  when  the  subject  peoples  were  finally 
merged  into  a  homogeneous  whole  ;  when  the  last  relics 
of  Canaanitish  nationality  were  stamped  out  by  the  final 
conquest  of  the  Jebusites  ;  and  when  Jerusalem  was  made 
the  capital  of  a  united  Israel,  this  feeling  must  have  in- 
creased both  in  extent  and  intensity.  The  bringing  of 
Jahweh  to  Jerusalem  by  David,  and  the  building  of  his 
temple  by  Solomon  (if  these  facts  be  historical),  must  have 
helped  to  stamp  him  as  the  great  god  of  the  race  :  and 
though  Solomon  also  erected  temples  to  other  Hebrew 
gods,  which  remained  in  existence  for  some  centuries,  we 
may  be  sure  that  from  the  date  of  the  opening  of  tlie  great 
central  shrine,  Jahweh  remained  the  principal  deity  of  the 
southern  kingdom  at  least,  after  the  separation. 

There  was  one  characteristic  of  Jahweh-worship,  how- 
ever, which  especially  helped  to  make  it  at  last  an  ex- 
clusive cult,  and  thus  paved  the  way  for  its  final  develop- 
ment into  a  pure  monotheism.    Jahweh  was   specially 

"^  known  to  be  a  "jealous  god  ":  this  is  a  trait  in  his  tem- 
perament early  and  often  insisted  on.  We  do  not  know 
when  or  where  the  famous  "  Ten  Words  "  were  first  pro- 
mulgated ;  but  we  have  every  reason  to  believe  that  in 
essence  at  least  they  date  from  a  very  antique  period. 
Now,  at  the  head  of  these  immemorial  precepts  of  Jahweh 
stands  the  prohibition  of  placing  any  other  gods  before 
his  face.  Originally,  no  doubt,  the  prohibition  meant 
exa  tly  what  it  states  ;  that  Jahweh  would  endure  no  com- 
panion gods  to  share  his  temple  ;  that  wherever  he  dwelt, 
he  would  dwell  alone  without  what  the  Greeks  would  have 
called  fellow  shrine-sharers.  Thus  we  know  that  no 
ashera  was  to  be  driven  into  the  ground  near  Jahweh's 
ark  ;  and  that  when  Dagon  found  himself  face  to  face 
with  the  Rock  of  Israel,  he  broke  in  pieces,  and  could  not 
stand  before  the  awful  presence  of  the  great  Hebrew 
Pilla  .     No  more  than  this,  then,  was  at  first  demanded 

A  by  *'  the  jealous  god  "  :  he  asked  of  his  worshippers  that 
they  should  keep  him  apart  from  the  society  of  all  inferior 


i  I!! 


w 


I     ' 


} 

I 

■'         t 

'.                       i 

;                           i 

i   t 
i  1 

1 

1  :    ■ 

2l8 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


gods,  should  allow  no  minor  or  rival  deity  to  enter  his 
precincts. 

Gradually,  however,  as  Jahweh-worship  grew  deeper, 
and  the  conception  of  godhead  became  wider  and  more 
sublime,  the  Jahweh-worshipper  began  to  put  a  stricter 
interpretation  upon  the  antique  command  of  the  jealous 
god.  It  was  supposed  that  every  circumcised  person, 
every  man  visibly  devoted  to  Jahweh,  owed  to  Jahweh 
alone  his  whole  religious  service.  Nobody  doubted  as 
yet,  indeed,  that  other  gods  existed  :  but  the  extreme 
Jehovists  in  the  later  days  of  national  independence  held 
as  an  article  of  faith  that  no  true  Israelite  ought  in  any 
way  to  honour  them.  An  internal  religious  conflict  thus 
arose  between  the  worshippers  of  Jahweh  and  the  worship- 
pers of  the  Baalim,  in  which,  as  might  be  expected,  the 
devotees  of  the  national  god  had  very  much  the  best  of  it. 
Exclusive  Jahweh-worship  became  thenceforth  the  ideal 
of  the  extreme  Jehovists  :  they  began  to  regard  all  other 
gods  as  "  idols,"  to  be  identified  with  their  images  ;  they 
"^  began  to  look  upon  Jahweh  alone  as  a  living  god,  at  least 
within  the  bounds  of  the  Israelitish  nation. 

To  this  result,  another  ancient  prohibition  of  the  priests 
of  Jahweh  no  doubt  largely  contributed.  The  priesthood 
held  it  unlawful  to  make  or  multiply  images  of  Jahweh. 
The  one  sacred  stone  enclosed  in  the  ark  was  alone  to  be 
worshipped  :  and  by  thus  concentrating  on  Shiloh,  or 
afterwards  on  Jerusalem,  the  whole  religious  spirit  of  the 
ethnical  cult,  they  must  largely  have  succeeded  in  cement- 
ing the  national  unity.  Strict  Jehovist-  looked  with  dis- 
like upon  the  adoration  paid  to  the  bull  images  in  the 
northern  kingdom,  though  those,  too,  were  regarded  (at 
least  in  later  days)  as  representatives  of  Jahweh.  They 
held  that  the  true  god  of  Abraham  was  to  be  found  only 
in  the  ark  at  Jerusalem,  and  that  to  give  to  the  Rock  of 
Israel  human  form  or  bestial  figure  was  in  itself  a  high 
crime  against  the  majesty  of  their  deity.  Hence  arose 
the   peculiar   Hebrew   dislike  to   "  idolatry "  ;  a   dislike 


I 


INFATUATION  OF  THE  PROPHETS. 


219 


never  equally  shared  by  any  but  Semitic  peoples,  and  hav- 
ing deep  roots,  apparently,  at  once  in  the  inartistic  genius 
of  the  people  and  in  the  profound  metaphysical  and 
dreamy  character  of  Semitic  thinking.  The  comparative 
emptiness  of  Semitic  shrines,  indeed,  was  always  a 
stumbling-block  to  the  Greek,  with  his  numerous  and  ex- 
quisite images  of  anthropomorphic  deities. 

All  that  was  now  wanted  to  drive  the  increasingly  ex- 
clusive and  immaterial  Jahweh-worship  into  pure  mono- 
theism for  the  whole  people  was  the  spur  of  a  great 
national  enthusiam,  in  answer  to  some  dangerous  external 
attack  upon  the  existence  of  Israel  and  of  Israel's  god. 
This  final  touch  was  given  by  the  aggression  of  Assyria, 
and  later  of  Babylon.  For  years  the  two  tiny  Israelitish 
kingdoms  had  maintained  a  precarious  independence  be- 
twe'^n  the  mighty  empires  of  Egypt  and  Mesopotamia. 
In  tne  eighth  century,  it  became  certain  that  they  could 
no  longer  play  their  accustomed  game  of  clever  diplomacy 
and  polite  subjection.  The  ver>  existence  of  Israel  was 
at  stake  ;  and  the  fanatical  worshippers  of  Jahweh,  now 
pushed  to  an  extreme  of  frenzy  by  the  desperate  straits  to 
which  they  were  reduced,  broke  out  in  that  memorable 
ecstasy  of  enthusiasm  which  we  may  fairly  call  the  Age  of 
the  Prophets,  and  which  produced  the  earliest  master- 
pieces of  Hebrew  literature  in  the  wild  effort  to  oppose 
to  the  arms  of  the  invaders  the  passive  resistance  of  a  su- 
preme Jahweh.  In  times  of  old,  the  prophets  say,  when 
Jahweh  led  the  forces  of  Israel,  the  horses  and  the  chariots 
of  their  enemies  counted  for  naught  :  if  in  this  crisis  Israel 
would  cease  to  think  of  aid  from  Egypt  or  alliance  with 
Assyria — if  Israel  would  get  rid  of  all  her  other  gods  and 
trust  only  to  Jahweh, — then  Jahweh  would  break  asunder 
the  strength  of  Assyria  and  would  reduce  Babylon  to  no- 
thing before  his  chosen  people. 

Such  is  the  language  that  Isaiah  ventured  to  use  in  the 
very  crisis  of  a  grave  national  danger. 

Now,  strange  as  it  seems  to  us  that  any  people  should 


.1 ) 


,ii> 


1    ■ 
/ 

s       ' 

i 

'  1 

wi  |-  j 

t 

'    1    , 

1 

t     ; 

i 

1 

;;  1 

' 

f 

r 

. 

;■!■!! 

F 

i 

220 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


have  thrown  themselves  into  such  a  general  state  of  fanati- 
cal folly,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  these  extraordinary 
counsels  prevailed  in  both  the  Israelitish  kingdoms,  and 
that  the  very  moment  when  the  national  existence  was 
most  seriously  imperilled  was  the  moment  chosen  by  the 
Jehovistic  party  for  vigorously  attempting  a  religious 
reformation.  The  downfall  of  Ephraim  only  quickened 
the  bigoted  belief  of  the  fanatics  in  Judah  that  pure 
Jahweh-worship  was  the  one  possible  panacea  for  the  dif- 
ficulties of  Israel.  Taking  advantage  of  a  minority  and  of 
a  plastic  young  king,  they  succeeded  in  imposing  exclu- 
sive Jehovism  upon  the  half-unwilling  people.  The 
timely  forgery  of  the  Book  of  Deuteromony — the  first 
germ  of  the  Pentateuch — by  the  priests  of  the  temple  at 
Jerusalem  was  quickly  followed  by  the  momentary  tri- 
umph of  pure  Jahweh-worship.  In  this  memorable  docu- 
ment, the  exclusive  cult  of  Jahweh  was  falsely  said  to  have 
descended  from  the  earliest  periods  of  the  national  ex- 
istence. Josiah,  we  are  told,  alarmed  at  the  denuncia- 
tions in  the  forged  roll  of  the  law,  set  himself  to  work  at 
once  to  root  out  by  violent  means  every  form  of 
"  idolatry."  He  brought  forth  from  the  house  of  Jahweh 
"  the  vessels  that  were  made  for  the  Baal,  and  for  the 
Ashera,  and  for  all  the  Host  of  Heaven,  and  he  burned 
them  without  Jerusalem  in  the  fields  of  Kidron."  He 
abolished  all  the  shrines  and  priesthoods  of  other  gods  in 
the  cities  of  Judah,  and  put  down  "  them  that  burned  in- 
cense to  the  Baal,  to  the  sun,  and  to  the  moon,  and  to  the 
planets,  and  all  the  Host  of  Heaven."  He  also  brought 
out  the  Ashera  from  the  temple  of  Jahweh,  and  burnt  it  to 
ashes  ;  and  "  took  away  the  horses  that  the  kings  of  Judah 
had  given  to  the  sun,  and  burned  the  chariots  of  the  sun 
with  fire."  And  by  destroying  the  temples  said  to  have 
been  built  by  Solomon  for  Chemosh,  Milcom,  and  Ashto- 
reth,  he  left  exclusive  and  triumphant  Jahweh-worship  the 
sole  accredited  religion  of  Israel. 
All,  however,  was  of  no  avail.    Religious  fanaticism 


DESTRUCTION  OF  THE  SACRED  STONE. 


221 


could  not  save  the  little  principality  from  the  aggressive 
arms  of  its  powerful  neighbours.  Within  twenty  or  thirty 
years  of  Josiah's  r^iformation,  the  Babylonians  ceased  to 
toy  with  their  petty  tributaries,  and  thrice  captured  and 
sacked  Jerusalem.  The  temple  of  Jahweh  was  burnt,  the 
chief  ornaments  were  removed,  and  the  desolate  site  itself 
lay  empty  and  deserted.  The  principal  inhabitants  were 
transported  to  Babylonia,  and  the  kingdom  of  Judah 
ceased  for  a  time  to  have  any  independent  existence  of  any 
sort. 

But  what,  in  this  disaster,  became  of  Jahweh  himself  ? 
How  fared  or  fell  the  Sacred  Stone  in  the  ark,  the  Rock  of 
Israel,  in  this  general  destruction  of  all  his  holiest  belong- 
ings ?     Strange  to  say,  the  Hebrew  annalist  never  stops  to 
tell  us.     In  the  plaintive  catalogue  of  the  wrongs  wrought 
by  the  Babylonians  at  Jerusalem,  every  pot  and  shovel  and 
vessel  is  enumerated,  but  "  the  ark  of  God  "  is  not  so  much 
as  once  mentioned.     Perhaps  the  historian  shrank  from 
relating  that  final  disgrace  of  his  country's  deity  ;  perhaps 
a  sense  of  reverence  prevented  him  from  chronicling  it  ; 
perhaps  he  knew  nothing  of  what  had  finally  been  done 
with  the  cherished  and  time-honoured  stone  pillar  of  his 
ancestors.     It  is  possible,  too,  that  with  his  later  and  more 
etherealised  conceptions  of  the  cult  of  his  god,  he  had 
ceased  to  regard  the  ark  itself  as  the  abode  of  Jahweh, 
and  was  unaware  that  his  tribal  deity  had  been  represented 
in  the  innermost  shrine  of  the  temple  by  a  rough-hewn 
pillar.     Be  that  as  it  may,  the  actual  fate  of  Jahweh  him- 
self is  involved  for  us  now  in  impenetrable  obscurity. 
Probably  the  invaders  who  took  away  "  the  treasures  of 
the  house  of  Jahweh,  and  cut  in  pieces  all  the  vessels  of 
gold  which  Solomon,  King  of  Israel,  had  made,"  would 
care  but  little  for  the  rude  sacred  stone  of  a  conquered 
people.     We  may  conjecture  that  they  broke  Jahweh  into 
a  thousand  fragments  and  ground  him  to  powder,  as 
Josiah  had  done  with  the  Baalim  and  the  Ashera,  so  that 
his  very  relics  could  no  longer  be  recognised  or  worshipped 


"i 


S  }   I 


11 


■■ 


222 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


\'\ 


!     i:: 


by  his  followers.  At  any  rate,  we  hear  no  more,  from  that 
time  forth,  of  Jahweh  himself,  as  a  material  existence,  or 
of  the  ark  he  dwelt  in.  His  spirit  alone  survived  unseen, 
to  guard  and  protect  his  chosen  people. 

Yet,  strange  to  say,  this  final  disappearance  of  Jahweh 
himself,  as  a  visible  and  tangible  god,  from  the  page  of 
hisiory,  instead  of  proving  the  signal  for  the  utter  down- 
fall of  his  cult  and  his  sanctity,  was  the  very  making  of 
Jahweh-worship  as  a  spiritual,  a  monotheistic,  and  a  cos- 
mopolitan religion.  At  the  exact  moment  when  Jahweh 
ceased  to  exist,  the  religion  of  Jahweh  began  to  reach  its 
highest  and  fullest  development.  Even  before  the  cap- 
tivity, as  we  have  seen,  the  prophets  and  their  party  had 
jbegun  to  form  a  most  exalted  and  spiritualised  conception 
■of  Jahweh's  greatness,  Jahweh's  holiness,  Jahweh's  un- 
approachable nature,  Jahweh's  superhuman  sublimity  and 
omnipotence.  But  now  that  the  material  Jahweh  itself, 
which  clogged  and  cramped  their  ideas,  had  disappeared 
for  ever,  this  spiritual  conception  of  a  great  Unseen  God 
wioened  and  deepened  amazingly.  Forbidden  by  their 
creed  and  by  Jahweh's  own  express  command  to  make 
any  image  of  their  chosen  deity,  the  Hebrews  in  Babylonia 
gradually  evolved  for  themselves  the  notion  of  a  Supreme 
Ruler  wholly  freed  from  material  bonds,  to  be  worshipped 
'without  image,  representative,  or  symbol  ;  a  dweller  in 
the  heavens,  invisible  to  men,  too  high  and  jure  for  hu- 
man eyes  to  look  upon.  The  conical  stone  in  the  ark  gave 
place  almost  at  once  to  an  incorporeal,  inscrutable,  and 
almighty  Being. 

It  was  during  the  captivity,  too,  that  pure  monotheism 
became  for  the  first  time  the  faith  of  Israel.  Convinced 
that  desertion  of  Jahweh  was  the  cause  of  all  their  previous 
misfortunes,  the  Jews  during  their  exile  grew  more  deeply 
attached  than  ever  to  the  deity  who  represented  their 
national  unity  and  their  national  existence.  They  made 
their  way  back  in  time  to  Judaea,  after  two  generations 
had  passed  away,  with  a  firm  conviction  that  all  their  hap- 


\d 


IDEALITY  OF  THE  LATER  JUDAISM. 


223 


piness  depended  on  restoring  in  ideal  purity  a  cult  that  had 
never  been  the  cult  of  their  fathers.  A  new  form  of 
Jahweh-worship  had  become  a  passion  among  those  who 
sat  disconsolate  by  the  waters  of  Babylon.  Few  if  any 
of  the  zealots  who  returned  at  last  to  Jerusalem  had 
ever  themselves  known  the  stone  god  who  lay  shrouded 

^  in  the  ark  :  it  was  the  etherealised  Jahweh  who  ruled  in 
heaven  above  among  the  starry  hosts  to  whom  they  of- 
fered up  aspirations  in  a  strange  land  for  the  restoration 
of  Israel.  In  the  temple  that  they  built  on  the  sacred  site 
to  the  new  figment  of  their  imaginations,  Jahweh  was  no 
longer  personally  present  :  it  was  not  so  much  his 
"  house,"  like  the  old  one  demolished  by  the  Babylonian 
invaders,  as  the  place  where  sacrifice  was  offered  and 
worship  paid  to  the  great  god  in  heaven.  The  new  reli- 
gion was  purely  spiritual  ;  Jahweh  had  triumphed,  but 
only  by  losing  his  distinctive  personal  characteristics,  and 
coming  out  of  the  crisis,  as  it  were,  the  blank  form  or 

"^  generic  conception  of  pure  deity  in  general. 

It  is  this  that  gives  monotheism  its  peculiar  power,  and 
enables  it  so  readily  to  make  its  way  everywhere.  For 
monotheism  is  religion  reduced  to  its  single  central  ele- 
ment ;  it  contains  nothing  save  what  every  votary  of  all 
gods  already  implicitly  believes,  with  every  unnecessary 
complexity  or  individuality  smoothed  away  and  simplified. 
Its  simplicity  recommends  it  to  all  intelligent  minds  ;  its 
uniformity  renders  it  the  easiest  and  most  economical  form 
of  pantheon  that  man  can  frame  for  himself. 

Under  the  influence  of  these  new  ideas,  before  long,  the 
whole  annals  of  Israel  were  edited  and  written  down  in 
Jehovistic  form  ;  the  Pentateuch  and  the  older  historical 
books  assumed  the  dress  in  which  we  now  know  them. 
From  the  moment  of  the  return  from  the  captivity,  too, 
the  monotheistic  conception  kept  ever  widening.  At 
first,  no  doubt,  even  with  the  Jews  of  the  Sixth  Century, 
Jahweh  was  commonly  looked  upon  merely  as  the  ethni- 
cal god  of  Israel.     But,  in  time,  the  sublimer  and  broader 


,  i      1      i 


•fi-    ' 


I 


224 


THE  RISE  OF  MONOTHEISM. 


!  1 


conception  of  some  few  among  the  earlier  poetical 
prophets  began  to  gain  general  acceptance,  and  Jahweh 
was  regarded  as  in  very  deed  the  one  true  God  of  all  the 
world — somewhat  such  a  God  as  Islam  and  Christendom 
to-day  acknowledge.  Still,  even  so,  he  was  as  yet  most 
closely  connected  with  the  Jewish  people,  through  whom 
alone  the  gentiles  were  expected  in  the  fulness  of  time  to 
learn  his  greatness.  It  was  reserved  for  a  Graeco- Jewish 
Cilician,  five  centuries  later,  to  fulfil  the  final  ideal  of  pure 
cosmopolitan  monotheism,  and  to  proclaim  abroad  the 
unity  of  god  to  all  nations,  with  the  Catholic  Church  as 
its  earthly  witness  before  the  eyes  of  universal  humanity. 
To  Paul  of  Tarsus  we  owe  above  all  men  that  great  and 
on  the  whole  cosmopolitanising  conception. 


''':! 


!  ^r 


'1.;    ': 


■  I 


'I    I 


:l^ 


4)1  a 

■ill'  '^'' 


li 


HUMAN  GODS. 


22$ 


cal 
eh 
:he 
)m 

DSt 

)m 
to 
ish 
ire 
he 
as 

ty. 

nd 


CHAPTER  XI. 


HUMAN  GODS. 


We  have  now  in  a  certain  sense  accomplished  our  in- 
tention of  tracing  the  evolution  of  gods  and  of  God.  We 
have  shown  how  polytheism  came  to  be,  and  how  from  it 
a  certain  particular  group  of  men,  the  early  Israelites, 
rose  by  slow  degrees,  through  natural  stages,  to  the  mono- 
theistic conception.  It  might  seem,  therefore,  as  though 
the  task  we  set  before  ourselves  was  now  quite  completed. 
Nevertheless,  many  abstruse  and  difficult  questions  still  lie 
before  us.  Our  problem  as  yet  is  hardly  half  solved.  We 
have  still  to  ask,  I  think.  How  did  this  purely  local  and 
national  Hebrew  deity  advance  to  the  conquest  of  the 
civilised  world  ?  How  from  an  obscure  corner  of  Lower 
Syria  did  the  god  of  a  small  tribe  of  despised  and  barbaric 
tributaries  slowly  live  down  the  great  conquering  deities  of 
Babylon  and  Susa,  of  Hellas  and  Italy  ?  And  again,  we 
have  further  to  enquire,  Why  do  most  of  the  modern  na- 
tions which  have  nominally  adopted  monotheism  yet  con- 
ceive of  their  god  as  compounded  in  some  mystically  in- 
comprehensible fashion  of  Three  Persons,  the  Father,  the 
Son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  ?  In  short,  I  am  not  satisfied 
with  tracing  the  idea  of  a  god  from  the  primitive  mummy 
or  the  secondary  ghost  to  the  one  supreme  God  of  the 
ancient  Hebrews ;  I  desire  also  to  follow  on  that  developed 
concept  till  it  merges  at  last  in  the  triune  God  of  modem 
Christendom.  For,  naturally,  it  is  the  god  in  whom  men 
believe  here  and  now  that  most  of  all  concerns  and  inter- 
ests us. 


I: 


•^ 


s 


I  s. 


.il 


«l 


H\ 


!'    i 


1^ 


lit     I' 


1      I 


i 


I  I 


,1     ^l' 
l(    (I     '  1 


f 

■i' 

:; 

'  1 

( 

i 

i 

■1 

;  ■  \ 

1 

! 

r 

I  ', 


!; 


226 


HUMAN  GODS. 


I  may  also  add  that,  incidentally  to  this  supplementary 
enquiry,  we  shall  come  upon  several  additional  traits  in 
the  idea  of  deity  and  several  important  sources  of 
earlier  godhead,  the  consideration  of  which  we  had  to 
postpone  before  till  a  more  convenient  season.  We  shal) 
find  that  the  process  of  tracking  down  Christianity  to  its 
hidden  springs  suggests  to  us  many  aspects  of  primitive 
religion  which  we  were  compelled  to  neglect  in  our  first 
hasty  synthesis. 

The  reader  must  remember  that  in  dealing  with  so  com- 
plex a  subject  as  that  of  human  beliefs  and  human  cults, 
it  is  impossible  ever  to  condense  the  whole  of  the  facts 
at  once  into  a  single  conspectus.  We  cannot  grasp  at  a 
time  the  entire  mass  of  evidence.  While  we  are  following 
out  one  clue,  we  must  neglect  another.  It  is  only  by  ex- 
amining each  main  set  of  components  in  analytical  dis- 
tinctness that  we  can  proceed  by  degrees  to  a  full  and 
complete  synthetic  reconstruction  of  the  whole  vast  fabric. 
We  must  therefore  correct  and  supplement  in  the  sequel 
much  that  may  have  seemed  vague,  inaccurate,  or  insuffi- 
cient in  our  preliminary  survey. 

The  Christian  religion  with  which  we  have  next  to  deal 
bases  itself  fundamentally  upon  the  personality  of  a  man, 
by  name  Jesus,  commonly  described  as  the  Christ,  that  is 
to  sav  "  the  anointed."  Of  this  most  sacred  and  deified 
person  it  is  affirmed  by  modern  Christianity,  and  has  been 
affirmed  by  orthodox  Christians  from  a  very  early  period, 
that  he  was  not  originally  a  mere  man,  afterwards  taken 
into  the  godhead,  but  that  he  was  born  from  the  first  the 
son  of  God,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  Hebrew  Jahweh  ;  that 
he  existed  previously  from  all  time  ;  that  he  was  miracu- 
lously conceived  of  a  virgin  mother  ;  that  he  was  crucified 
and  buried  ;  that  on  the  third  day  he  arose  from  the  dead  ; 
and  that  he  is  now  a  living  and  distinct  person  in  a  divine 
and  mystically-united  Trinity.  I  propose  to  show  in  the 
subsequent  chapters  how  far  all  these  conceptions  were 
already  familiar  throughout  the  world  in  which  Christian- 


A7A^G5  ARE  GODS. 


227 


ity  was  promulgated,  and  to  how  large  an  extent  the  new 
religion  owed  its  rapid  success  to  the  fact  that  it  was  but  a 
resume  or  idealised  embodiment  of  all  the  chief  concep- 
tions already  common  to  the  main  cults  of  Mediterranean 
civilisation.  At  the  moment  when  the  empire  was  cos- 
mopolitanising  the  world,  Christianity  began  to  cos- 
mopolitanise  religion,  by  taking  into  itself  whatever  was 
central,  common,  and  universal  in  the  worship  of  the  peo- 
ples among  whom  it  originated. 

We  will  begin  with  the  question  of  the  incarnation, 
which  lies  at  the  very  root  of  the  Christian  concept. 

I  have  said  already  that  in  ancient  Egypt  and  elsewhere, 
"  The  God  was  the  Dead  King,  the  King  was  the  Living 
God."  This  is  true,  literally  and  absolutely.  Since  the 
early  kings  are  gods,  the  present  kings,  their  descendants, 
are  naturally  also  gods  by  descent  ;  their  blood  is  divine  ; 
they  differ  in  nature  as  well  as  in  position  from  mere  com- 
mon mortals.  While  they  live,  they  are  gods  on  earth  ; 
when  they  die,  they  pass  over  to  the  community  of  the 
gods  their  ancestors,  and  share  with  them  a  happy  and 
regal  immortality.  We  have  seen  how  this  essential 
divinity  of  the  Pharaoh  is  a  prime  article  in  the  religious 
faith  of  the  Egyptian  Pyramid-builders.  And  though  in 
later  days,  when  a  Greek  dynasty,  not  of  the  old  divine 
native  blood,  bore  sway  in  Egypt,  this  belief  in  the  divinity 
of  the  king  grew  fainter,  yet  to  the  very  last  the  Ptolemies 
and  the  Cleopatras  bear  the  title  of  god  or  goddess,  and 
carry  in  their  hands  the  sacred  tail  or  cnix  ansata,  the  sym- 
bol and  mark  of  essential  divinity. 

The  inference  made  in  Egypt  that  the  children  of  gods 
must  be  themselves  divine  was  also  made  in  most  other 
countries,  especially  in  those  where  similar  great  despo- 
tisms established  themselves  at  an  early  grade  of  culture. 
Thus  in  Peru,  the  Incas  were  gods.  They  were  the  chil- 
dren of  the  Sun  ;  and  when  they  died,  it  was  said  that  their 
father,  the  Sun,  had  sent  to  fetch  them.  The  Mexican 
kings  were  likewise  gods,  with  full  control  of  the  course  of 


;L 


V^n 


I  y 


'■\ 


:( 


228 


HUMAN  GODS. 


if 


I      r 


nature  ;  they  swore  at  their  accession  to  make  the  sun 
shine,  the  rain  fall,  the  rivers  flow,  and  the  earth  bring 
forth  her  fruit  in  due  season.  How  they  could  promise 
all  this  seems  at  first  a  little  difficult  for  us  to  conceive  ; 
but  it  will  become  more  comprehensible  at  a  later  stage 
of  our  investigation,  when  we  come  to  consider  the  gods 
of  cultivation  :  even  at  present,  if  we  remember  that  kings 
are  children  of  the  Sun,  and  that  sacred  trees,  sacred 
groves,  and  sacred  wells  are  closely  connected  with  the 
tombs  of  their  ancestors,  we  can  guess  at  the  beginning 
of  such  a  mental  connexion.  Thus  the  Chinese  emperor 
is  the  Son  of  Heaven  ;  he  is  held  responsible  to  his  people 
for  the  occurrence  of  drought  or  other  serious  derange- 
ments of  nature.  The  Parthian  kings  of  the  Arsacid 
house,  says  Mr.  Frazer,  to  whom  I  am  greatly  indebted 
for  most  of  the  succeeding  facts,  styled  themselves  brothers 
of  the  sun  and  moon,  and  were  worshipped  as  deities. 
Numberless  other  cases  are  cited  by  Mr.  Frazer,  who  was 
the  first  to  point  out  the  full  importance  of  this  widespread 
belief  in  man-gods.  I  shs  ollow  him  largely  in  the 
subsequent  discussion  of  tl.  .ardinal  subject,  though  I 
shall  often  give  to  the  facts  an  interpretation  slightly  dif- 
ferent from  that  which  he  would  allow  to  be  the  correct 
one.  For  to  me,  godhead  springs  always  from  the  primi- 
tive Dead  Man,  while  to  Mr.  Frazer  it  is  spiritual  or 
animistic  in  origin. 

Besides  these  human  gods  who  are  gods  by  descent 
from  deified  ancestors,  there  is  another  class  of  gods  who 
are  gods  by  inspiration  or  indwelling  of  the  divine  spirit, 
that  is  to  say  of  some  ghost  or  god  who  temporarily  or 
permanently  inhabits  the  body  of  a  living  man.  The 
germ-idea  of  such  divine  possession  we  may  see  in  the 
facts  of  epilepsy,  catalepsy,  dream,  and  madness.  In  all 
such  cases  of  abnormal  nervous  condition  it  seems  to 
primitive  man,  as  it  still  seemed  to  the  Jews  of  the  age 
of  the  Gospels,  that  the  sufferer  is  entered  or  seized  upon 
by  some  spirit,  who  bodily  inhabits  him.    The  spirit  may 


INCARNATION. 


229 


throw  the  man  down,  or  may  speak  through  his  mouth 
in  strange  unknown  tongues  ;  it  may  exalt  him  so  that 
he  can  perform  strange  feats  of  marvellous  strength,  or 
may  debase  him  to  a  position  of  grovelling  abjectness. 
By  fasting  and  religious  asceticism  men  and  women  can 
even  artificially  attain  this  state,  when  the  god  speaks 
through  them,  as  he  spoke  through  the  mouth  of  the 
Pythia  at  Delphi.  And  fasting  is  always  one  of  the  re- 
ligious exercises  of  god-possessed  men,  priests,  monks, 
anchorites,  and  ascetics  in  general.  Where  races  have 
learnt  how  to  manufacture  intoxicating  drinks,  or  to  ex- 
press narcotic  juices  from  plants,  they  also  universally  at- 
tribute the  effects  of  such  plants  to  the  personal  action  of 
an  inspiring  spirit — an  idea  so  persistent  even  into  civilised 
ages  that  we  habitually  speak  of  alcoholic  liquors  as  spirits. 
Both  these  ways  of  attaining  the  presence  of  an  indwelling 
god  are  commonly  practised  among  savages  and  half- 
civilised  people. 

When  we  recollect  how  we  saw  already  that  ancestral 
spirits  may  descend  from  time  to  time  into  the  skulls  that 
once  were  theirs,  or  into  the  clay  or  wooden  images  that 
represent  them,  and  there  give  oracles,  we  shall  not  be 
surprised  to  find  that  they  can  thus  enter  at  times  into  a 
human  body,  and  speak  through  its  lips,  for  good  or  for 
evil.  Indeed,  I  have  dwelt  but  little  in  this  book  on  this 
migratory  power  and  this  ubiquitousness  of  Ihe  spirits, 
because  I  have  desired  to  fix  attention  chiefly  on  that  pri- 
mary aspect  of  religion  which  is  immediately  and  directly 
concerned  with  Worship  ;  but  readers  famihar  with  such 
works  as  Dr.  Tylor's  and  Mr.  Frazer's  will  be  well  aware 
of  the  common  power  which  spirits  possess  of  projecting 
themselves  readily  into  every  part  of  nature.  The  faculty 
of  possession  or  of  divination  is  but  one  particular  ex- 
ample of  this  well-known  attribute.  The  mysteries  and 
oracles  of  all  creeds  are  full  of  such  phenomena. 

Certain  persons,  again,  are  bom  from  the  womb  as  in- 
carnations of  a  god  or  an  ancestral  spirit.     "  Incarnate 


■^ 


230 


HUMAN  GODS. 


fr 


i:'' 


I     ! 


\'      i| 


gods,"  says  Mr.  Frazer,  "  are  common  in  rude  society. 
The  incarnation  may  be  temporary  or  permanent.  .  .  . 
When  the  divine  spirit  has  taken  up  its  abode  in  a  human 
body,  the  god-man  is  usually  expected  to  vindicate  his 
character  by  working  miracles."  Mr.  Fr?zer  gives  several 
excellent  examples  of  both  these  classes.  I  extract  a  few 
almost  verbatim. 

Certain  persons  are  possessed  from  time  to  time  by  a 
spirit  or  deity  ;  while  possession  lasts,  their  own  person- 
ality lies  in  abeyance,  and  the  presence  of  the  spirit  is 
revealed  by  convulsive  shakings  and  quiverings  of  the 
body.  In  this  abnormal  state,  the  man's  utterances  are 
accepted  as  the  voice  of  the  god  or  spirit  dwelling  in 
him  and  speaking  through  him.  In  Mangaia,  for  instance, 
the  priests  in  whom  the  gods  took  up  their  abode  were 
called  god-boxes  or  gods.  Before  giving  oracles,  they 
drank  an  intoxicating  liquor,  and  the  words  they  spoke 
in  their  frenzy  were  then  regarded  as  divine.  In  other 
cases,  the  inspired  person  produces  the  desired  condition 
of  intoxication  by  drinking  the  fresh  blood  of  a  victim, 
human  or  animal,  which,  as  wc  shall  see  hereafter,  is  proba- 
bly itself  an  avatar  of  the  inspiring  god.  In  the  temple 
of  Apollo  Diradiotes  at  Argos,  a  lamb  was  sacrificed  by 
night  once  a  month  ;  a  woman,  who  had  to  observe  the 
rule  of  chastity,  tasted  its  blood,  and  then  gave  oracles. 
At  ^gira  in  Achrea  the  priestess  of  the  Earth  drank  the 
fresh  blood  of  a  bull  before  she  descended  into  her  cave 
to  prophesy.  (Note  in  passing  that  caves,  the  places  of 
antique  burial,  are  also  the  usual  place",  for  prophetic  in- 
spiration.) In  southern  India,  the  so-called  devil-dancer 
drinks  the  blood  of  a  goat,  and  then  becomes  seized  with 
the  divine  afflatus.  He  is  worshipped  as  a  deity,  and 
bystanders  ask  him  questions  requiring  superhuman 
knowledge  to  answer.  Mr.  Frazer  extends  this  list  of 
oracular  practices  by  many  other  striking  instances,  for 
which  I  would  refer  the  reader  to  the  original  volume. 

Of  permanent  living  human  gods,  inspired  by  the  con- 


VARIOUS  TYPES  OF  MAN-GOD. 


231 


stant  indwelling  of  a  deity,  Mr.  Frazer  also  gives  several 
apt  examples.  In  the  Marquesas  Islands  there  was  a  class 
of  men  who  were  deified  in  their  lifetime.  They  were  sup- 
posed to  wield  supernatural  control  over  the  elements. 
They  could  give  or  withhold  rain  and  good  harvests.  Hu- 
man sacrifices  were  ofTered  them  to  appease  their  wrath. 
"A  missionary  has  described  one  of  these  human  gods  from 
personal  observation.  The  god  was  a  very  old  man  who 
lived  in  a  large  house  within  an  enclosure."  (A  temple 
in  its  temenos.)  "  In  ihe  house  was  a  kind  of  altar,  and 
on  the  beams  of  the  house  and  on  the  trees  around  it  were 
hung  human  skeletons,  head  down.  No  one  entered  the 
enclosure,  except  the  persons  dedicated  to  the  service  of 
the  god  ;  only  on  days  when  human  victims  were  sacri- 
ficed might  ordinary  people  penetrate  into  the  precinct. 
This  human  god  received  more  sacrifices  than  all  the 
other  gods  ;  often  he  would  sit  on  a  sort  of  scaffold  in 
front  of  his  house  and  call  for  two  or  three  human  victims 
at  a  time.  They  were  always  brought,  for  the  terror  he 
inspired  was  extreme.  He  v;as  invoked  all  over  the  island, 
and  offerings  were  sent  to  him  from  every  side."  Indeed, 
throughout  the  South  Sea  Islands,  each  island  had  usually 
a  man  who  embodied  its  deity.  Such  men  were  called 
gods,  and  were  regarded  as  of  divine  substance.  The 
man-god  was  sometimes  a  king  ;  oftener  he  was  a  priest 
or  a  subordinate  chief.  The  gods  of  Samoa  were  some- 
times permanently  incarnate  in  men,  who  gave  oracles, 
received  offerings  (occasionally  of  human  flesh),  healed  the 
sick,  answered  prayer,  and  generally  performed  all  divine 
functions.  Of  the  Fijians  it  is  said  :  "  There  appears  to 
be  no  certain  line  of  demarcation  between  departed  spirits 
and  gods,  nor  between  gods  and  living  men,  for  many  of 
the  priests  and  old  chiefs  are  considered  as  sacred  persons, 
and  not  a  few  of  them  will  also  claim  to  themselves  the 
right  of  divinity.  *  I  am  a  god,'  Tuikilakila  would  say  ; 
and  he  believed  it  too."  There  is  said  to  be  a  sect  in 
Orissa  who  worship  the  Queen  of  England  as  their  chief 


232 


HUMAN  GODS. 


w 


i! 


I 


I;! 


^1 


Bit    :\\ 


divinity  ;  and  another  sect  in  the  Punjab  worshipped  dur- 
ing his  lifetime  the  great  General  Nicholson. 

Sometimes,  I  believe,  kings  are  divine  by  birth,  as 
descendants  of  gods  ;  but  sometimes  divinity  is  conferred 
upon  them  with  the  kingship,  as  indeed  was  the  case  even 
in  the  typical  instance  of  Egypt.  Tanatoa,  king  of  Raiatea, 
was  deified  by  a  certain  ceremony  performed  at  the  chief 
temple.  He  was  made  a  god  before  the  gods  his  an- 
cestors, as  Celtic  chiefs  received  the  chieftainship  standing 
on  the  sacred  stone  of  their  fathers.  As  one  of  the  deities 
of  his  subjects,  therefore,  the  king  was  worshipped,  con- 
sulted as  an  oracle,  and  honoured  with  sacrifices.  The 
king  of  Tahiti  at  his  inauguration  received  a  sacred  girdle 
of  red  and  yellow  feathers,  which  not  only  raised  him  to 
the  highest  earthly  station,  but  also  identified  him  with 
the  heavenly  gods.  Compare  the  way  in  which  the  gods 
of  Egypt  make  the  king  one  of  themselves,  as  represented 
in  the  bas-reliefs,  by  the  presentation  of  the  divine  tau. 
In  the  Pelew  Islands,  a  god  may  incarnate  himself  in  a 
common  person  ;  this  lucky  man  is  thereupon  raised  to 
sovereign  rank,  and  rules  as  god  and  king  over  the  com- 
munity. Not  unsimilar  is  the  mode  of  selection  of  a  Grand 
Lama.  In  later  stages,  the  king  ceases  to  be  quite  a  god, 
but  retains  the  anointment,  the  consecration  on  a  holy 
stone,  and  the  claim  to  "divine  right";  he  also  shows 
some  last  traces  of  deity  in  his  divine  power  to  heal 
diseases,  which  fades  away  at  last  into  the  practice  of 
"  touching  for  king's  evil."  On  all  these  questions,  again, 
Mr.  Frazer's  great  work  is  a  perfect  thesaurus  of  apposite 
instances.     I  abstain  from  quoting  his  whole  two  volumes. 

But  did  ideas  of  this  character  still  survive  in  the  Medi- 
terranean world  of  the  first  and  second  centuries,  where 
Christianity  was  evolved  ?  Most  undoubtedly  they  did. 
In  Egypt,  the  divine  line  of  the  Ptolemies  had  only  just 
become  'extinct.  In  Rome  itself,  the  divine  Caesar  had 
recently  undergone  official  apotheosis  ;  the  divine  Augus- 
tus had  ntled  over  the  empire  as  the  adopted  son  of  the 


KILLING  THE  GOD. 


233 


new-made  god  ;  and  altars  rose  in  provincial  cities  to  the 
divine  spirit  of  the  reigning  Trajan  or  Hadrian.  Indeed, 
both  forms  of  divinity  were  claimed  indirectly  for  the  god 
Julius  ;  he  was  divine  by  apotheosis,  but  he  was  also 
descended  from  the  goddess  Venus.  So  the  double  claim 
was  made  for  the  central  personage  of  the  Christian  faith  : 
he  was  the  son  of  God — that  is  to  say  of  Jahweh  ;  but  he 
was  also  of  kingly  Jewish  origin,  a  descendant  of  David, 
and  in  the  genealogies  fabricated  for  him  in  the  Gospels 
extreme  importance  is  attached  to  this  pretended  royal 
ancestry.  Furthermore,  how  readily  men  of  the  Medi- 
terranean civilisation  could  then  identify  living  persons 
with  gods  we  see  in  the  familiar  episode  of  Paul  and  Bar- 
nabas at  Lystra.  Incarnation,  in  short,  was  a  perfectly 
ordinary  feature  of  religion  and  daily  life  as  then  under- 
stood. And  to  oriental  ideas  in  particular,  the  conception 
was  certainly  no  novelty.  "  Even  an  infant  king,"  say 
the  laws  of  Manu,  which  go  to  the  root  of  so  much  eastern 
thinking,  "  must  not  be  despised  from  an  idea  that  he  is 
a  mere  mortal  :  for  he  is  a  great  deity  in  human  form." 

To  most  modem  thinkers,  however,  it  would  seem  at 
first  sight  like  a  grave  difficulty  in  the  way  of  accepting 
the  deity  of  an  ordinary  man  that  he  should  have  suffered 
a  violent  death  at  the  hands  of  his  enemies.  Yet  this  fact, 
instead  of  standing  in  the  way  of  acceptance  of  Christ's 
divinity,  is  really  almost  a  guarantee  and  proof  of  it.  For, 
strange  as  it  sounds  to  us,  the  human  gods  were  frequently 
or  almost  habitually  put  to  death  by  their  votaries.  The 
secret  of  this  curious  ritual  and  persistent  custom  has  been 
ingeniously  deciphered  for  us  by  Mr.  Frazer,  whose  book 
is  almost  entirely  devoted  to  these  two  main  questions, 
"  Why  do  men  kill  their  gods  ?  "  and  "  Why  do  they  eat 
and  drink  their  flesh  and  blood  under  the  form  of  bread 
and  wine  ?  "  We  must  go  over  some  of  the  same  ground 
here  in  rapid  summary,  with  additional  corollaries  ;  and 
we  must  also  bring  Mr,  Frazer's  curious  facts  into  Hne 
with  our  general  principles  of  the  origin  of  godhead. 


wmm 


234 


HUMAN  GODS. 


\lU 


n 


,u 


\\U 


I;' 


M  ^ 


ti 


Meanwhile,  it  may  be  well  to  add  he.e  two  similar 
instances  of  almost  contemporary  apotheoses.  The  dic- 
tator Julius  was  killed  by  a  band  of  reactionary  conspira- 
tors, and  yet  was  immediately  raised  to  divine  honours. 
A  little  later,  Antinous,  the  favourite  of  the  emperor 
Hadrian,  devoted  himself  to  death  in  order  to  avert  mis- 
fortune from  his  master  ;  he  was  at  once  honoured  with 
temples  and  worship.  The  belief  that  it  is  expedient  that 
"  one  man  should  die  for  the  people,"  and  that  the  person 
who  so  dies  is  a  god  in  human  shape,  formed,  as  we  shall 
see,  a  common  component  of  many  faiths,  and  especially 
of  the  faiths  of  the  eastern  Mediterranean.  Indeed,  a 
little  later,  each  Christian  martyrdom  is  followed  as  a 
matter  of  course  by  canonisation — that  is  to  say,  by  minor 
apotheosis.  Mr.  Frazer  has  traced  the  genesis  of  this 
group  of  allied  beliefs  in  the  slaughter  of  the  man-god  in 
the  most  masterly  manner.  They  spring  from  a  large 
number  of  converging  ideas,  some  of  which  can  only  come 
out  in  full  as  we  proceed  in  later  chapters  to  other 
branches  of  our  subject. 

In  all  parts  of  the  world,  one  of  the  commonest 
prerogatives  and  functions  of  the  human  god  is  the  care 
of  the  weather.  As  representative  of  heaven,  it  is  his  busi- 
ness to  see  that  rain  falls  in  proper  quantities,  and  that  the 
earth  brings  forth  her  increase  in  due  season.  But,  god 
though  he  is,  he  must  needs  be  coerced  if  he  does  not 
attend  to  this  business  properly.  Thus,  in  West  Africa, 
when  prayers  and  offerings  presented  to  the  king  have 
failed  to  procure  rain,  his  subjects  bind  him  with  ropes, 
and  take  him  to  the  grave  of  his  deified  forefathers,  that 
he  may  obtain  from  them  the  needful  change  in  the 
weather.  Here  we  see  in  the  fullest  form  the  nature  of 
the  relation  between  dead  gods  and  living  ones.  The 
Son  is  the  natural  mediator  between  men  and  the  Father. 
Among  the  Antaymours  of  Madagascar,  the  king  is  re- 
sponsible for  bad  crops  and  all  other  misfortunes.  The 
ancient  Scythians,  when  food  was  scarce,  put  their  kings 


I ,  -Sf 


IVHV   THE  GOD  IS  KILLED. 


235 


in  bonds.  The  Banjars  in  West  Africa  ascribe  to  their 
king  the  power  of  causing  rain  or  fine  weather.  As  long 
as  the  cHmate  is  satisfactory,  they  load  him  with  presents 
of  grain  and  cattle.  But  if  long  drought  or  rain  does 
serious  harm,  they  insult  and  beat  him  till  the  weather 
changes.  The  Burgundians  deposed  their  king  if  he  failed 
to  make  their  crops  grow  to  their  satisfaction. 

Further  than  that,  certain  tribes  have  even  killed  their 
kings  in  times  of  scarcity.  In  the  days  of  the  Swedish 
king  Domalde,  a  mighty  famine  broke  out,  which  lasted 
several  years,  and  could  not  be  stayed  by  human  or  animal 
sacrifices.  So,  in  a  great  popular  assembly  held  at  Upsala, 
the  chiefs  decided  that  King  Domalde  himself  was  the 
cause  of  the  scarcity,  and  must  be  sacrificed  for  good 
seasons.  Then  they  slew  him,  and  smeared  with  his  blood 
the  altars  of  the  gods.  Here  we  must  recollect  that  the 
divine  king  is  himself  a  god,  the  descendant  of  gods,  and 
he  is  sacrificed  to  the  offended  spirits  of  his  own  fore- 
fathers. We  shall  see  hereafter  how  often  similar  episodes 
occur — how  the  god  is  sacrificed,  himself  to  himself  ;  how 
the  Son  is  sacrificed  to  the  Father,  both  being  gods  ;  and 
how  the  Father  sacrifices  his  Son,  to  make  a  god  of  him. 
To  take  another  Scandinavian  example  from  Mr.  Frazer's 
collection  :  in  the  reign  of  King  Olaf,  there  came  a  great 
dearth,  and  the  people  thought  that  the  fault  was  the 
king's,  because  he  was  sparing  in  sacrifices.  So  they 
mustered  an  army  and  marched  against  him  ;  then  they 
surrounded  his  palace  and  burnt  it,  with  him  within  it, 
*'  giving  him  to  Odin  as  a  sacrifice  •  for  good  crops." 
Many  points  must  here  be  noted.  Olaf  himself  was  of 
divine  stock,  a  descendant  of  Odin.  He  is  burnt  as  an 
offering  to  his  father,  much  as  the  Carthaginians  burnt 
their  sons,  or  the  king  of  Moab  his  first-born,  as  sacrifices 
to  Melcarth  and  to  Chemosh.  The  royal  and  divine 
person  is  Jiere  offered  up  to  his  own  fathers,  just  as  on  the 
cross  of  the  founder  of  Christendom  the  inscription  ran, 
"  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  king  of  the  Jews,"  and  just  as  in 


; '  i  W: 


236 


HUMAN  GODS. 


V   IM 


111 


*    '.ll    }' 

( 


r 


it  ^ 


Ml  I 


r:  '!.:i 


Christian  theology  God  ofifers  his  Son  as  a  sacrifice  to  his 
own  offended  justice. 

Other  instances  elsewhere  point  to  the  same  analogies. 
In  1 8 14,  a  pestilence  broke  out  among  the  reindeer  of  the 
Chukches  (a  Siberian  tribe)  ;  and  the  shamans  declared 
that  the  beloved  chief  Koch  must  be  sacrificed  to  the 
angry  gods  (probably  his  ancestors)  ;  so  the  chief's  own 
son  stabbed  him  with  a  dagger.  On  the  coral  island  of 
Niue  in  the  South  Pacific  there  once  reigned  a  line  of 
kings  ;  but  they  were  also  "  high-priests  "  (that  is  to  say, 
divine  representatives  of  divine  ancestors)  ;  and  they  were 
supposed  to  make  the  crops  grow,  for  a  reason  which  will 
come  out  more  fully  in  the  sequel.  In  times  of  scarcity, 
the  people  "  grew  angry  with  them  and  killed  them,"  or 
more  probably,  as  I  would  interpret  the  facts,  sacrificed 
them  for  crops  to  their  own  deified  ancestors.  So  in  time 
there  were  no  kings  left,  and  the  monarchy  ceased  alto- 
gether on  the  island. 

The  divine  kings  being  thus  responsible  for  rain  and 
wind,  and  for  the  growth  of  crops,  whose  close  dependence 
upon  them  we  shall  further  understand  hereafter,  it  is  clear 
that  they  are  persons  of  the  greatest  importance  and 
value  to  the  community.  Moreover,  in  the  ideas  of  early 
men,  their  spirit  is  almost  one  with  that  of  external  nature, 
over  which  they  exert  such  extraordinary  powers.  A 
subtle  sympathy  seems  to  exist  between  the  king  and  the 
world  outside.  The  sacred  trees  which  embody  his  an- 
cestors ;  the  crops,  which,  as  we  shall  see  hereafter, 
equally  embody  them  ;  the  rain-clouds  in  which  they 
dwell  ;  the  heaven  they  inhabit  ; — all  these,  as  it  were, 
are  parts  of  the  divine  body,  and  therefore  by  implication 
part  of  the  god-king's,  who  is  but  the  avatar  of  his  deified 
fathers.  Hence,  whatever  affects  the  king,  affects  the  sky, 
the  crops,  the  rain,  the  people.  There  is  even  reason  to 
believe  that  the  man-god,  representative  of  the  ancestral 
spirit  and  tribal  god,  is  therefore  the  representative  and 
embodiment  of  the  tribe  itself — the  soul  of  the  nation. 


; 

■   r 

i 

J 

'   1 

IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  GOD'S  HEALTH. 


237 


rly 


m- 


ey 


>n 
led 


Ito 
ral 


in. 


Uitat,  c'est  moi  is  no  mere  personal  boast  of  Louis 
Quatorze ;  it  is  the  belated  survival  of  an  old  and 
once  very  powerful  belief,  shared  in  old  times  by  kings 
and  peoples.  Whatever  hurts  the  king,  hurts  the  people, 
and  hurts  by  implication  external  nature.  Whatever 
preserves  the  king  from  danger,  preserves  and  saves  the 
world  and  the  nation. 

Mr.  Frazer  has  shown  many  strange  results  of  these 
early  beliefs — which  he  traces,  however,  to  the  supposed 
primitive  animism,  and  not  (as  I  have  done)  to  the  in- 
fluence of  the  ghost-theory.  Whichever  interpretation 
we  accept,  however,  his  facts  at  least  are  equally  valuable. 
He  calls  attention  to  the  number  of  kingly  taboos  which 
are  all  intended  to  prevent  the  human  god  from  endanger- 
ing or  imperilling  his  divine  life,  or  from  doing  anything 
which  might  react  hurtfully  upon  nature  and  the  welfare 
of  his  people.  The  man-god  is  guarded  by  the  strictest 
rules,  and  surrounded  by  precautions  of  the  utmost  com- 
plexity. He  may  not  set  his  sacred  foot  on  the  ground, 
because  he  is  a  son  of  heaven  ;  he  may  not  eat  or  drink 
with  his  sacred  mouth  certain  dangerous,  impure,  or  un- 
holy foods  ;  he  may  not  have  his  sacred  hair  cut,  or  his 
sacred  nails  pared  ;  he  must  preserve  intact  his  divine 
body,  and  every  part  of  it — the  incarnation  of  the  commu- 
nity,— lest  evil  come  of  his  imprudence  or  his  folly. 

The  Mikado,  for  example,  was  and  still  is  regarded 
as  an  incarnation  of  the  sun,  the  deity  who  rules  the  entire 
universe,  gods  and  men  included.  The  greatest  care  must 
therefore  be  taken  both  by  him  and  of  him.  His  whole 
life,  down  to  its  minutest  details,  must  be  so  regulated 
that  no  act  of  his  may  upset  the  established  order  of  nature. 
Lest  he  should  touch  the  earth,  he  used  to  be  carried 
wherever  he  went  on  men's  shoulders.  He  could  not  ex- 
pose his  sacred  person  to  the  open  air,  nor  eat  out  of  any 
but  a  perfectly  new  vessel.  In  every  way  his  sanctity  and 
his  health  were  jealously  guarded,  and  he  was  treated  like 


H    t 


2.-^8 


HUMAN  GODS. 


ni 


) 


H 


:i!  i 


m 


!   .  I     ' 


,  1  ''!! 

■    i  ■      !! 


:     II 


I 


a  person  whose  security  was  important  to  the  whole  course 
of  nature. 

Mr.  Frazer  quotes  several  similar  examples,  of  which  the 
most  striking  is  that  of  the  high  pontiff  of  the  Zapotecs, 
an  ancient  people  of  Southern  Mexico.  This  spiritual 
lord,  a  true  Pope  or  Lama,  governed  Yopaa,  one  of  the 
chief  cities  of  the  kingdom,  with  absolute  dominion.  He 
was  looked  upon  as  a  god  "  whom  earth  was  not  worthy 
to  hold  or  the  sun  to  shine  upon."  He  profaned  his 
sanctity  if  he  touched  the  common  ground  with  his 
holy  foot.  The  officers  who  bore  his  palanquin  on  their 
shoulders  were  chosen  from  the  members  of  the  highest 
families  ;  he  hardly  deigned  to  look  on  anything  around 
him  ;  those  who  met  him  prostrated  themselves  humbly 
on  the  ground,  lest  death  should  overtake  them  if  they 
even  saw  his  divine  shadow.  (Compare  the  apparition 
of  Jahweh  to  Moses.)  A  rule  of  continence  was  ordi- 
narily imposed  upon  him  ;  but  on  certain  days  in  the  year 
which  were  high  festivals,  it  was  usual  for  him  to  get 
ceremonially  and  sacramentally  drunk.  On  such  days, 
we  may  be  sure,  the  high  gods  peculiarly  entered  into 
him  with  the  intoxicating  pulque,  and  the  ancestral  spirits 
reinforced  his  godhead.  While  in  this  exalted  state 
("  full  of  the  god,"  as  a  Greek  or  Roman  would  have  said) 
the  divine  pontifT  received  a  visit  from  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  of  the  virgins  consecrated  to  the  service  of  the 
gods.  If  the  child  she  bore  him  was  a  son,  it  succeeded 
in  due  time  to  the  throne  of  the  Zapotecs.  We  have  here 
again  an  instructive  mixture  of  the  various  ideas  out  of 
which  such  divine  kingship  and  godship  is  constructed. 

It  might  seem  at  first  sight  a  paradoxical  corollary  that 
people  who  thus  safeguard  and  protect  their  divine  king, 
the  embodiment  of  nature,  should  also  habitually  and 
ceremonially  kill  him.  Yet  the  apparent  paradox  is,  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  early  worshipper,  both  natural  and 
reasonable.  We  read  of  the  Congo  negroes  that  they  have 
a  supreme  pontiflf  whom  they  regard  as  a  god  upon  earth, 


r<  1  fi^ 


THE  GOD  MUST  DIE  YOUNG. 


239 


[hat 

[ng. 
ind 


and  all-powerful  in  heaven.  But,  "  if  he  were  to  die  a 
natural  death,  they  thought  the  world  would  perish,  and 
the  earth,  which  he  alone  sustained  by  his  power  and  merit, 
would  immediately  be  annihilated."  This  idea  of  a  god 
as  the  creator  and  supporter  of  all  things,  without  whom 
nothing  would  be,  is  of  course  a  familiar  component  ele- 
ment of  the  most  advanced  theology.  But  many  nations 
which  worship  human  gods  carry  out  the  notion  to  its 
logical  conclusion  in  the  most  rigorous  manner.  Since 
the  god  is  a  man,  it  would  obviously  be  quite  wrong  to 
let  him  grow  old  and  weak  ;  since  thereby  the  whole 
course  of  nature  might  be  permanently  enfeebled  ;  rain 
would  but  dribble  ;  crops  would  grow  thin  ;  rivers  would 
trickle  away  ;  and  the  race  he  ruled  would  dwindle  to 
nothing.  Hence  senility  must  never  overcome  the  sacred 
man-god  ;  he  must  be  killed  in  the  fulness  of  his  strength 
and  health  (say,  about  his  thirtieth  year),  so  that  the  in- 
dwelling spirit,  yet  young  and  fresh,  may  migrate  unim- 
paired into  the  body  of  some  newer  and  abler  representa- 
tive. Mr.  Frazer  was  the  first,  I  believe,  to  point  out  this 
curious  result  of  primitive  human  reasoning,  and  to  illus- 
trate it  by  numerous  and  conclusive  instances. 

I  cannot  transcribe  here  in  full  Mr.  Frazer's  admirable 
argument,  with  the  examples  which  enforce  it  ;  but  I 
must  at  least  give  so  much  of  it  in  brief  as  will  suffice  for 
comprehension  of  our  succeeding  exposition.  "  No 
amount  of  care  and  precaution,"  he  says,  "  will  prevent 
the  man-god  from  growing  old  and  feeble,  and  at  last 
dying.  His  worshippers  have  to  lay  their  account  with 
this  sad  necessity  and  to  meet  it  as  best  they  can.  The 
danger  is  a  formidable  one  ;  for  if  the  course  of  nature  is 
dependent  on  the  man-god's  life,  what  catastrophes  may 
not  be  expected  from  the  gradual  enfeeblement  of  his 
powers  and  their  final  extinction  in  death  ?  There  is  only 
one  way  of  averting  these  dangers.  The  man-god  must 
be  killed  as  soon  as  he  shows  symptoms  that  his  powers 
are  beginning  to  fail,  and  his  soul  must  be  transferred  to 


.  J 


'^ 


240 


HUMAN  GODS. 


'.    u 


a  vigorous  successor  before  it  has  been  seriously  impaired 
by  the  threatened  decay.  The  advantages  of  thus  putting 
the  man-god  to  death  instead  of  allowing  him  to  die  of 
old  age  and  disease  are,  to  the  savage,  obvious  enough. 
For  if  the  man-god  dies  what  we  call  a  natural  death,  it 
means,  according  to  the  savage,  that  his  soul  has  either 
voluntarily  departed  from  his  body  and  refuses  to  return, 
or  more  commonly  that  it  has  been  extracted  or  at  least 
detained  in  its  wanderings  by  a  demon  or  sorcerer.  In 
any  of  these  cases  the  soul  of  the  man-god  is  lost  to  his 
worshippers  ;  and  with  it  their  prosperity  is  gone  and  their 
very  existence  endangered.  Even  if  they  could  arrange 
to  catch  the  soul  of  the  dying  god  as  it  left  his  lips  or  his 
nostrils  and  so  transfer  it  to  a  successor,  this  would  not 
effect  their  purpose  ;  for,  thus  dying  of  disease,  his  soul 
would  necessarily  leave  his  body  in  the  last  stage  of  weak- 
ness and  exhaustion,  and  as  such  it  would  continue  to 
drag  out  a  feeble  existence  in  the  body  to  which  it  might 
be  transferred.  Whereas  by  killing  him  his  worshippers 
could,  in  the  first  place,  make  sure  of  catching  his  soul 
as  it  escaped  and  tiansferring  it  to  a  suitable  successor  ; 
and,  in  the  second  place,  by  killing  him  before  his  natural 
force  was  abated,  they  would  secure  that  the  world  should 
not  fall  into  decay  with  the  decay  of  the  man-god.  Every 
purpose,  therefore,  was  answered,  and  all  dangers  averted 
by  thus  killing  the  man-god  and  transferring  his  soul, 
while  yet  at  its  prime,  to  a  vigorous  successor." 

For  this  reason,  when  the  pontiff  of  Congo  grew  old, 
and  seemed  likely  to  die,  the  man  who  was  destined  to 
succeed  him  in  the  pontificate  entered  his  house  with  a 
rope  or  club,  and  strangled  or  felled  him.  The  Ethio- 
pian kings  of  Meroe  were  worshipped  as  gods  ;  but  when 
the  priests  thought  fit,  they  sent  a  messenger  to  the  king, 
ordering  him  to  die,  and  alleging  an  oracle  of  the  gods 
(or  earlier  kings)  as  the  reason  of  their  command.  This 
command  the  kings  always  obeyed  down  to  the  reign  of 
Ergamenes,  a  contemporary  of  Ptolemy  II.  of  Egypt.     So, 


^u 


THE  GOD  MUST  DIE  VIGOROUS. 


241 


of 
ISo, 


when  the  king  of  Unyoro  in  Central  Africa  falls  ill,  or  be- 
gins to  show  signs  of  approaching  age,  one  of  his  own 
wives  is  compelled  by  custom  to  kill  him.  The  kings  of 
Sofala  were  regarded  by  their  people  as  gods  who  could 
give  rain  or  sunshine  ;  but  the  slightest  bodily  blemish, 
such  as  the  loss  of  a  tooth,  was  considered  a  sufficient 
reason  for  putting  one  of  these  powerful  man-gods  to 
death  ;  he  must  be  whole  and  sound,  lest  all  nature  pay 
for  it.  Many  kings,  human  gods,  divine  priests,  or  sultans 
are  enumerated  by  Mr.  Frazer,  each  of  whom  must  be 
similarly  perfect  in  every  limb  and  member.  The  same 
perfect  manhood  is  still  exacted  of  the  Christian  Pope, 
who,  however,  is  not  put  to  death  in  case  of  extreme  age 
or  feebleness.  But  there  is  reason  to  believe  that  the 
Grand  Lama,  the  divine  Pope  of  the  Tibetan  Buddhists, 
is  killed  from  time  to  time,  so  as  to  keep  him  "  ever  fresh 
and  ever  young,"  and  to  allow  the  inherent  deity  within 
him  to  escape  full-blooded  into  another  embodiment. 

In  all  these  cases  the  divine  king  or  priest  is  suffered 
by  his  people  to  retain  office,  or  rather  to  house  the  god- 
head, till  by  some  outward  defect,  or  some  visible  warning 
of  age  or  illness,  he  shows  them  that  he  is  no  longer  equal 
to  the  proper  performance  of  his  divine  functions.  Until 
such  symptoms  appear,  he  is  not  put  to  death.  Some  peo- 
ples, however,  as  Mr.  Frazer  shows,  have  net  thought  it 
safe  to  wait  for  even  the  slightest  symptom  cf  decay  be- 
fore killing  the  human  god  or  king  ;  they  have  destroyed 
him  in  the  plenitude  of  his  life  and  vigour.  In  such  cases, 
the  people  fix  a  term  beyond  which  the  king  may  not 
reign,  and  at  the  close  of  which  he  must  die,  the  term 
being  short  enough  to  prevent  the  probability  of  degenera- 
tion meanwhile.  In  some  parts  of  Southern  India,  for 
example,  the  term  was  fixed  at  twelve  years  ;  at  the  ex- 
piration of  that  time,  the  king  had  to  cut  himself  to  pieces 
visibly,  before  the  great  local  idol,  of  which  he  was  in  all 
probability  the  human  equivalent.  "  Whoever  desires  to 
reign  other  twelve  years,"  says  an  early  observer,  "  and  to 


.-,1 


I 


> ;  I 


242 


HUMAN  GODS. 


undertake  this  martyrdom  for  the  sake  of  the  idol,  has  to 
be  present  looking  on  at  this  ;  and  from  that  place  they 
raise  him  up  as  king." 

The  king  of  Calicut,  on  the  Malabar  coast,  had  also  to 
cut  his  throat  in  public  after  a  twelve  years'  reign.  But 
towards  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  rule  was 
so  far  relaxed  that  the  king  was  allowed  to  retain  the 
throne,  and  probably  the  godship,  if  he  could  protect  him- 
self against  all  comers.  As  long  as  he  was  strong  enough 
to  guard  his  position,  it  was  held  that  he  was  strong 
enough  to  retain  the  divine  power  unharmed.  The  King 
of  the  Wood  at  Aricia  held  his  priesthood  and  ghostly 
kingship  on  the  same  condition  ;  as  long  as  he  could  hold 
his  own  against  all  comers,  he  might  continue  to  be  priest  ; 
but  any  runaway  slave  had  the  right  of  attacking  the  king  ; 
and  if  he  could  kill  him,  he  became  the  King  of  the  Wood 
till  some  other  in  turn  slew  him.  This  curious  instance 
has  been  amply  and  learnedly  discussed  by  Mr.  Frazer, 
and  forms  the  central  subject  of  his  admirable  treatise. 

More  often  still,  however,  the  divine  priesthood,  king- 
ship, or  godhead  was  held  for  one  year  alone,  for  a  reason 
which  we  shall  more  fully  comprehend  after  we  have  con- 
sidered the  aniiuai  gods  of  cultivation.  The  most  inter- 
esting example,  and  the  most  cognate  to  our  present 
enquiry,  is  that  of  the  Babylonian  custom  cited  by 
Btrosus.  During  the  five  days  of  the  festival  called  the 
Sacaea,  a  prisoner  condemned  to  death  was  dressed  in  the 
king's  robes,  seated  on  the  king's  throne,  allowed  to  eat, 
drink,  and  order  whatever  he  chose,  and  even  permitted 
to  sleep  with  the  king's  concubines.  But  at  the  end  of 
five  days,  he  was  stripped  of  his  royjl  insignia,  scourged, 
and  crucified.  I  need  hardly  point  out  the  crucial  impor- 
tance of  this  singular  instance,  occurring  in  a  country 
within  the  Semitic  ci;de.  Mr.  Frazer  rightly  concludes 
that  the  condemned  man  was  meant  to  die  in  the  king's 
stead  ;  was  himself,  in  point  of  fact,  a  king  substitute  ; 
and  was  therefore  invested  for  the  time  being  with  the 


TEMPORARY  KINGS. 


243 


red. 


ides 


ite; 
the 


fullest  prerogatives  of  royalty.     Doubtless  we  have  here 
to  deal  with  a  modification  of  an  older  and  sterner  rule, 
which  compelled  the  king  himself  to  be  slain  annually. 
"  When  the  time  drew  near  for  the  king  to  be  put  to 
death,"  says  Mr.  Frazer,  ''  he  abdicated  for  a  few  days, 
during  which  a  temporary  king  reigned  and  suffered  in 
his  stead.     At  first  the  temporary  king  may  have  been  an 
innocent  person,  possibly  a  member  of  the  king's  own 
family  ;  but  with  the  growth  of  civilisation,  the  sacrifice 
of  an  innocent  person  would  be  revolting  to  the  public 
sentiment,  and  accordingly  a  condemned  criminal  would 
be  invested  with  the  brief  and  fatal  sovereignty ....  We 
shall  find  other  examples  of  a  criminal  representing  a  dy- 
ing god.     For  we  must  not  forget  that  the  king  is  slain 
in  his  character  of  a  god,  his  death  and  resurrection,  aa 
the  only  means  of  perpetuating  the  divine  life  unimpaired^ 
being  deemed  necessary  for  the  salvation  of  his  people  and 
the  world."     I  need  not  point  out  the  importance  of  such 
ideas  as  assisting  in  the  formation  of  a  groundwork  for  the 
doctrines  of  Christianity  , 

Other  evidence  on  this  point,  of  a  more  indirect  nature, 
has  been  collected  by  Mr.  Frazer  ;  and  still  more  will  come 
out  in  subsequent  chapters.  For  the  present  I  will  only 
add  that  the  annual  character  of  some  such  sacrifices 
seems  to  be  derived  from  the  analogy  of  the  annually- 
slain  gods  of  cultivation,  whose  origin  and  meaning  we 
have  yet  to  examine.  These  gods,  being  intimately  con- 
nected with  each  year's  crop,  especially  with  crops  of 
cereals,  pulses,  and  other  annual  grains,  were  naturally 
put  to  death  at  the  beginning  of  each  agricultural  year, 
and  as  a  rule  about  the  period  of  the  spring  equinox, — say, 
at  Easter.  Starting  from  that  analogy,  as  I  believe,  many 
races  thought  it  fit  that  the  other  divine  person,  the  man- 
god  king,  should  also  be  put  to  death  annually,  often 
about  the  same  period.  And  I  will  even  venture  to  sug- 
gest the  possibility  that  the  institution  of  annual  consuls, 
archons,  etc.,  may  have  something  to  do  with  such  annua! 


V' 


pm 


I'll  fi' n 


244 


HUMAN  GODS. 


sacrifices.  Certainly  the  l^^gend  of  Codrus  at  Athens  and 
of  the  Regifugium  at  Rome  seem  to  point  to  an  ancient 
king-slaying  custom. 

At  any  rate,  it  is  now  certain  that  the  putting  to  death 
of  a  public  man-god  was  a  common  incident  of  many  re- 
ligions. And  it  is  also  clear  that  in  many  cases  travellers 
and  other  observers  have  made  serious  mistakes  by  not 
understanding  the  inner  nature  of  such  god-slaying 
practices.  For  instance  it  is  now  pretty  certain  that 
Captain  Cook  was  killt  1  by  the  people  of  Tahiti  just 
because  he  was  a  god,  perhaps  in  order  to  keep  his  spirit 
among  them.  It  is  likewise  clear  that  many  rites,  com- 
monly interpreted  as  human  sacrifices  to  a  god,  are 
really  god-slayings  ;  often  the  god  in  one  of  his  human 
avatars  seems  to  be  offered  to  himself,  in  his  more  perma- 
nent embodiment  as  an  idol  or  stone  image.  This  idea 
of  sacrificing  a  god,  himself  to  himself,  is  one  which  will 
frequently  meet  us  hereafter ;  and  I  need  hardly  point  out 
that,  as  "  the  sacrifice  of  the  mass,"  it  has  even  enshrined 
itself  in  the  central  sanctuary  of  the  Christian  religion. 

Christianity  apparently  took  its  rise  among  a  group  of 
irregular  northern  Israelites,  the  Galilaeans,  separated 
from  the  mass  of  their  coreligionists,  the  Jews,  by  the 
intervention  of  a  heretical  and  doubtfully  Israelitish 
wedge,  the  Samaritans.  The  earliest  believers  in  Jesus  were 
thus  intermediate  between  Jews  and  Syrians.  According 
to  their  own  tradition,  they  were  first  described  by  the 
name  of  Christians  at  Antioch  ;  and  they  appear  on  many 
grounds  to  have  attracted  attention  first  in  Syria  in  gen- 
eral, and  particularly  at  Damascus.  We  may  be  sure, 
therefore,  that  their  tenets  from  the  first  would  contain 
many  elements  more  or  less  distinctly  Syrian,  and  espe- 
cially such  elements  as  formed  ideas  held  in  common  by 
almost  all  the  surrounding  peoples.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
Christianity,  as  we  shall  see  hereafter,  may  be  regarded 
historically  as  a  magma  of  the  most  fundamental  religious 
ideas  of  the  Mediterranean  basin,  and  especially  of  the 


THE  BLOOD  OF   THE  GOD. 


1 


245 


eastern  Mediterranean,  grafted  on  to  the  Jewish  cult  and 
the  Jewish  scripture?,  and  clustering  round  the  personality 
of  the  man-god,  Jesus.  It  is  interesting  therefore  to  note 
that  in  Syria  and  the  north  Semitic  area  the  principal  cult 
was  the  cult  of  just  such  a  slain  man-god,  Adonis, — origi- 
nally, as  Mr.  Frazer  shows,  an  anually  slain  man-god, 
afterwards  put  to  death  and  bewailed  in  efifigy,  after  a 
fashion  of  which  we  shall  see  not  a  few  examples  in  the 
sequel,  and  of  which  the  Mass  itself  is  but  an  etherealised 
survival.  Similarly  in  Phrygia,  where  Christianity  early 
made  a  considerable  impression,  the  most  devoutly-  wor- 
shipped among  the  gods  was  Attis,  who,  as  Professor 
Ramsay  suggests,  was  almost  certainly  embodied  in  early 
times  as  an  annually  slain  man-god,  and  whose  cult  was 
always  carried  on  by  means  of  a  divine  king-priest,  bearing 
himself  the  name  of  Attis.  Though  in  later  days  the 
priest  did  not  actually  immolate  himself  every  year,  yet 
on  the  yearly  feast  of  the  god,  at  the  spring  equinox  (cor- 
responding to  the  Christian  Easter)  he  drew  blood  from 
his  own  arms,  as  a  substitute  no  doubt  for  the  earlier 
practice  of  self-slaughter.  And  I  may  add  in  this  con- 
nexion (to  anticipate  once  more)  that  in  all  such  god- 
slaughtering  rites,  immense  importance  was  always  at- 
tached to  the  blood  of  the  man-god  ;  just  as  in  Christian- 
ity "  the  blood  of  Christ "  remains  to  the  end  of  most 
saving  efficacy.  Both  Adonis  and  Attis  were  conceived 
as  young  men  in  the  prime  of  life,  like  the  victims  chosen 
for  other  god-slaying  rites. 

I  have  dealt  in  this  chapter  only  in  very  brief  summary 
with  this  vast  and  interesting  question  of  human  deities. 
Mr.  Frazer  has  devoted  to  it  two  large  and  fascinating 
volumes.  His  work  is  filled  with  endless  facts  as  to  such 
man-gods  themselves,  the  mode  of  their  vicarious  or  ex- 
piatory slaughter  on  behalf  of  the  community,  the  gentler 
substitution  of  condemned  criminals  for  the  divine  kings 
in  more  civilised  countries,  the  occasional  mitigation 
whereby  the  divine  king  merely  draws  his  own  blood  in- 


!8S8 


1  -I 


246 


HUMAN  GODS. 


Stead  of  killing  himself,  or  where  an  effigy  is  made  to  take 
the  place  of  the  actual  yictim,  and  so  forth  ad  infinitum. 
All  these  valuable  suggestions  and  ideas  I  could  not  re- 
produce here  without  transcribing  in  full  many  pages  of 
The  Golden  Bough,  where  Mr.  Frazer  has  marshalled  the 
entire  evidence  on  the  point  with  surprising  effectiveness. 
I  will  content  myself  therefore  by  merely  referring  readers 
to  that  most  learned  yet  interesting  and  amusing  bock. 
I  will  only  say  in  conclusion  that  what  most  concerns  us 
here  is  Mr.  Frazer's  ample  and  convincing  proof  of  the 
large  part  played  by  such  slain  (and  rerisen)  man-gods  in 
the  religion  of  those  self-same  east-Mediterranean  coun- 
tries where  Christianity  was  first  evolved  as  a  natural  pro- 
duct of  the  popular  imagination.  The  death  and  resur- 
rection of  the  humanly-embodied  god  form  indeed  the 
keynote  of  the  greatest  and  most  sacred  religions  of 
western  Asia  and  northeastern  Africa. 


!      I: 


:■ , 


'     I 


i'f     I 


ARTIFICIAL  GODS. 


247 


CHAPTER  XII. 


THE   MANUFACTURE   OF   GOF/S. 


Normally  and  originally,  I  believe,  all  gods  grow  spon- 
taneously. They  evolve  by  degrees  out  of  dead  and 
deified  ancestors  or  chieftains.  The  household  gods  are 
the  dead  of  the  family  ;  the  greater  gods  are  the  dead 
chiefs  of  the  state  or  town  or  village.  But  upon  this 
earlier  and  spontaneous  crop  of  gods  there  supervenes 
later  an  artificial  crop,  deliberately  manufactured.  The 
importance  of  this  later  artificial  class  is  so  great,  especially 
in  connexion  with  the  gods  of  agriculture,  and  with  the 
habit  of  eating  the  god's  body  as  corn  and  drinking  his 
blood  as  wine,  that  't  becomes  necessary  for  us  here  to 
examine  their  nature  in  due  order.  We  shall  find  that 
some  knowledge  of  them  is  needed  preliminary  to  the 
comprehension  of  the  Christian  system. 

We  saw  that  in  West  Africa  the  belief  in  another  world 
is  so  matter-of-fact  and  material  that  a  chief  who  wishes  to 
communicate  with  his  dead  father  kills  a  slave  as  a  mes- 
senger, after  first  impressing  upon  him  the  nature  of  the 
message  he  will  have  to  deliver.  If  he  forgets  anything, 
says  Mr.  Duff  Macdonald,  he  kills  a  second  and  sends  him 
after  "  as  a  postscript."  A  Khond  desired  to  be  avenged 
upon  an  enemy  ;  so  he  cut  off  the  head  of  his  mother,  who 
cheerfully  suggested  this  domestic  arrangement,  in  order 
that  her  ghost  might  haunt  and  terrify  the  oifender. 
Similar  plenitude  of  belief  in  the  actuality  and  nearness 
of  the  Other  World  makes  attendants,  wives,  and  even 
friends  of  a  dead  man,  in  many  countries,  volunteer  to  kill 


mmmm 


248 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  CODS. 


j> 


I)* 


1 

1 

■  1 

1   1 
1  '■ 

!, 

i 

( 

1 

( 

:    M 

ill 

themselves  at  his  funeral,  in  order  that  they  may  accom- 
pany their  lord  and  master  to  the  nether  realms.  All  these 
examples  combine  to  show  us  two  things  :  first,  that  the 
other  life  is  very  real  and  close  to  the  people  who  behave 
so  ;  and  second,  that  no  great  unwillingness  habitually 
exists  to  migration  from  this  life  to  the  next,  if  occasion 
demands  it. 

Starting  with  such  ideas,  it  is  not  surprising  that  many 
races  should  have  deliberately  made  for  themselves  gods 
by  killing  a  man,  and  especially  a  man  of  divine  or  kingly 
blood,  the  embodiment  of  a  god,  in  order  that  his  spirit 
might  perform  some  specific  divine  function.  Nor  is  it 
even  remarkable  that  the  victim  selected  for  such  a  pur- 
pose should  voluntarily  submit  to  death,  often  preceded 
by  violent  torture,  so  as  to  attain  in  the  end  to  a  position 
of  trust  and  importance  as  a  tutelary  deity.  We  have 
only  to  remember  the  ease  with  which  Mahommedan 
fanatics  will  face  death,  expecting  to  enjoy  the  pleasures 
of  Paradise,  or  the  fervour  with  which  Christian  believers 
used  to  embrace  the  crown  of  martyrdom,  in  order  to 
convince  ourselves  of  the  reality  and  profundity  of  such 
a  sentiment.  The  further  back  we  go  in  time  or  culture, 
the  stronger  does  the  sentiment  in  question  become  ;  it 
is  only  the  civilised  and  sceptical  thinker  who  hesitates  to 
exchange  the  solid  comforts  of  this  world  for  the  shadowy 
and  uncertain  delights  of  the  next. 

The  existence  of  such  artificially-manufactured  gods 
has  been  more  or  less  recognised  for  some  time  past,  and 
attention  has  been  called  to  one  or  other  class  of  them 
by  Mr.  Baring  Gould  and  Mr.  J.  G.  Frazer  ;  but  I  believe 
the  present  work  will  be  the  first  in  which  their  profound 
importance  and  their  place  in  the  genesis  of  the  hgher 
religions  has  been  fully  pointed  out  in  systematic  detail. 

The  best  known  instances  of  such  deliberate  god- 
making  are  those  which  refer  to  the  foundation  of  cities, 
city  walls,  and  houses.  In  such  cases,  a  human  victim  is 
often  sacrificed  in  order  that  his  blood  may  be  used  as 


FOUNDATION  GODS. 


249 


cement,  and  his  soul  be  built  in  to  the  very  stones  of  the 
fabric.  Thereafter  he  becomes  the  tutelary  deity  or  "  for- 
tune "  of  the  house  or  city.  In  many  cases,  the  victim 
offers  himself  voluntarily  for  the  purpose  ;  frequently  he 
is  of  kingly  or  divine  ancestry.  As  a  sheep  before  her 
shearers  is  dumb,  so  he  opens  not  his  mouth.  In  Poly- 
nesia, where  we  usually  stand  nearest  to  the  very  core  of 
religion,  Ellis  heard  that  the  central  pillar  of  the  temple 
at  Mieva  was  planted  upon  the  body  of  a  human  victim. 
Among  the  Dyaks  of  Borneo,  a  slave  girl  was  crushed  to 
death  under  the  first  post  of  a  house.  In  October  1881, 
the  king  of  Ashanti  put  fifty  girls  to  death  that  their  blood 
might  be  mixed  with  the  "  swish  "  or  mud  used  in  the 
repair  of  the  royal  buildings.  Even  in  Japan,  a  couple  of 
centuries  s'nce,  when  a  great  wall  was  to  be  built,  "  some 
wretched  slave  would  ofifer  himself  as  a  foundation." 
Observe  in  this  instance  the  important  fact  that  the  im- 
molation was  purely  voluntary.  Mr.  Tylor,  it  is  true, 
treats  most  of  these  cases  as  though  the  victim  were  in- 
tended to  appease  the  earth-demons,  which  is  the  natural 
interpretation  for  the  elder  school  of  thinkers  to  put  upon 
such  ceremonies  ;  but  those  who  have  read  Mr.  Frazer 
and  Mr.  Baring  Gould  will  know  that  the  ofifering  is  really 
a  piece  of  deliberate  god-making.  Many  of  the  original 
witnesses,  indeed,  correctly  report  this  intention  on  the 
part  of  the  perpetrators  ;  thus  Mason  was  told  by  an  eye- 
witness that  at  the  building  of  the  new  city  of  Tavoy  in 
Tennasserim  "  a  criminal  was  put  in  each  post-hole  to 
become  a  protecting  demon "  or  rather  deity.  So  in 
Siam,  when  a  new  city  gate  was  being  erected,  says  Mr. 
Speth,  officers  seized  the  first  four  or  eight  people  who 
passed,  and  buried  them  under  it  "  as  guardian  angels." 
And  in  Roumania  a  stahic  is  defined  as  "  the  ghost  of  a 
person  who  has  been  immured  in  the  walls  of  a  building 
in  order  to  make  it  more  solid."  The  Irish  Banshee  is 
doubtless  of  similar  origin. 

Other  curious  examples  are  reported  from  Africa.     In 


M 


H 


250 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


14 


el  I 


^\i 


ti      'I 
<1 


Galam,  a  boy  and  girl  used  to  be  buried  alive  before  the 
great  gate  of  a  city,  to  make  it  impregnable  ;  and  I  gather 
here  that  the  sacrifice  was  periodically  renewed,  as  we  shall 
see  it  to  have  been  in  many  other  cases.  In  Great  Bassam 
and  Yarriba,  similar  sacrifices  were  usual  at  the  founda- 
tion of  a  house  or  village.  Clearly  the  idea  in  these  cases 
was  to  supply  the  site  with  a  tutelary  deity,  a  god  whose 
existence  was  bound  up  with  the  place  thus  consecrated 
to  him.  He  and  the  town  henceforth  were  one  ;  he  was 
its  soul,  and  it  was  his  body.  Human  victims  are  said  to 
have  been  buried  "  for  spirii-watchers  "  under  the  gates  of 
Mandelay.  So  too,  accoiding  to  legend,  here  a  tolerably 
safe  guide,  a  queen  was  drowned  in  a  Burmese  reservoir, 
to  make  the  dyke  safe ;  while  the  choice  for  such  a  purpose 
of  a  royal  victim  shows  clearly  the  desirability  of  divine 
blood  being  present  in  the  body  of  the  future  deity.  When 
Rajah  Sala  Byne  was  building  the  fort  of  Sialkot  in  the 
Punjaub,  the  foundation  gave  way  so  often  that  he  con- 
sulted a  soothsayer.  The  soothsayer  advised  that  the 
blood  of  an  only  son  should  be  shed  on  the  spot  ;  and  the 
only  son  of  a  widow  was  accordingly  killed  there.  I  may 
add  that  the  blood  of  "  an  only-begotten  son  "  has  always 
been  held  to  possess  peculiar  efficacy. 

In  Europe  itself,  not  a  few  traces  survive  of  such  founda- 
tion-gods, or  spirits  of  towns,  town-walls,  and  houses. 
The  Picts  are  said  to  have  bathed  their  foundation-stones 
in  human  blood,  especially  in  building  their  forts  and 
castles.  St.  Columba  himself,  though  nominally  a  Chris- 
tian, did  not  scruple  thus  to  secure  the  safety  of  his  monas- 
tery. "  Columbkille  said  to  his  people,  *  It  would  be 
well  for  us  that  our  roots  should  pass  into  the  earth  here.' 
And  he  said  to  them, '  It  is  permitted  to  you  that  some  one 
of  you  go  under  the  earth  to  consecrate  it.' "  St.  Oran 
volunteered  to  accept  the  task,  and  was  ever  after  hon- 
oured as  the  patron  saint  of  the  monastery.  Here  again  it 
may  be  noted  that  the  offering  was  voluntary.  As  late  as 
1463,  when  the  broken  dam  of  the  Nogat  had  to  be  re- 


:',  t 


»»» 


GODS  OF  CITY  WALLS. 


251 


paired,  the  peasants,  being  advised  to  throw  in  a  Hving 
man,  are  said  to  have  made  a  beggar  drunk  (in  which 
state  he  would  of  course  be  "  full  of  the  god  ")  and  utilised 
him  for  the  purpose.  In  1885,  on  the  restoration  of  Hols- 
worthy  church  in  Devon,  a  skeleton  with  a  mass  of  mortar 
plastered  over  the  mouth  was  found  embedded  in  an  angle 
of  the  building.  To  make  the  castle  of  Liebenstein  fast 
and  impregnable,  a  child  was  bought  'or  hard  money  of 
its  mother,  and  walled  into  the  building.  Again,  when 
the  church  at  Blex  in  Oldenburg  was  being  built,  the 
authorities  of  the  village  crossed  the  Weser,  "  bought 
a  child  from  a  poor  mother  at  Bremerleke,  and  built  it 
alive  into  the  foundations."  We  shall  see  hereafter  that 
"  to  be  bought  with  a  price  "  is  a  variant,  as  it  were,  on 
the  voluntary  offering  ;  great  Jitress  is  often  laid  when  a 
victim  is  offered  on  this  particular  fact,  which  is  held  to 
absolve  the  perpetrators  from  the  crime  of  god-murder. 
So,  we  shall  see  in  the  sequel,  the  divine  animal-victim, 
which  is  the  god  offered  to  himself,  his  animal  embodiment 
to  his  image  or  altar,  must  always  consent  to  its  own  sac- 
rifice ;  if  it  refuse  or  show  the  slightest  disinclination,  it 
is  no  good  victim.  Legend  says  that  the  child  in  the  case 
of  the  Liebenstein  offering  was  beguiled  with  a  cake, 
probably  so  as  to  make  it  a  consenting  party,  and  was 
slowly  walled  up  before  the  eyes  of  the  mother.  All  these 
details  are  full  of  incidental  instructiveness  and  impor- 
tance. As  late  as  1865,  according  to  Mr.  Speth,  some 
Christian  labourers,  working  at  a  block-house  at  Duga, 
near  Scutari,  found  two  young  Christian  children  in  the 
hands  of  Mahommedan  Arnauts,  who  were  trying  to  bury 
them  alive  under  the  block-house. 

It  is  about  city  walls,  however,  that  we  oftenest  read 
such  legendary  stories.  Thus  the  wall  of  Copenhagen 
sank  as  fast  as  it  was  built  ;  so  they  took  an  innocent  little 
girl,  and  set  her  at  a  table  with  toys  and  eatables.  Then, 
while  she  played  and  eat,  twelve  master  masons  closed  a 
vault  over  her.     With  clanging  music,  to  drown  the  child's 


!     I  . 


252 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


\ 


\    i     I 


fi 
I 


f! 


cries,  the  wall  was  raised,  and  stood  fast  ever  after.  In 
Italy,  once  more,  the  bridge  of  Arta  fell  in,  time  after  time, 
till  they  walled  in  the  master  builder's  wife  ;  the  last  point 
being  a  significant  detail,  whose  meaning  will  come  out 
still  more  clearly  in  the  sequel.  At  Scutari  in  Servia,  once 
more,  the  fortress  could  only  be  satisfactorily  built  after  a 
human  victim  was  walled  into  it ;  so  the  three  brothers  who 
wrought  at  it  decided  to  ofifer  up  the  first  of  their  wives 
who  came  to  the  place  to  bring  them  food.  (Compare  the 
case  of  Jephtha's  daughter,  where  the  first  living  thing  met 
by  chance  is  to  be  sacrificed  to  Jahweh.)  So,  too,  in 
Welsh  legend,  Vortigern  could  not  finish  his  tower  till 
the  foundation-stone  was  wetted  with  "  the  blood  of  a 
child  born  of  a  mother  without  a  father  " — this  episode  of 
che  virgin-born  infant  being  a  common  element  in  the 
generation  of  man-gods,  as  Mr.  Sidney  Hartland  has 
abundantly  proved  for  us. 

In  one  case  cited  above,  we  saw  a  mitigation  of  the 
primitive  custom,  in  that  a  criminal  was  substituted  for  a 
person  of  royal  blood  or  divine  origin — a  form  of  substi- 
tution of  which  Mr.  Frazer  has  supplied  abundant  ex- 
amples in  other  connexions.  Still  further  mitigations  are 
those  of  building-in  a  person  who  has  committed  sacrilege 
or  broken  some  religious  vow  of  chastity.  In  the  museum 
at  Algiers  is  a  plaster  cast  of  the  mould  left  by  the  body 
of  one  Geronimo,  a  Moorish  Christian  (and  therefore  a 
recusant  of  Islam),  who  was  built  into  a  block  of  concrete 
in  the  angle  of  the  fort  in  the  sixteenth  century.  Faithless 
nuns  were  so  immured  in  Europe  during  the  middle  ages  ; 
and  Mr.  Rider  Haggard's  statement  that  he  saw  in  the 
museum  at  Mexico  bodies  similarly  immured  by  the  In- 
quisition has  roused  so  intich  Catholic  wrath  and  denial 
that  one  can  hardly  have  any  hesitation  in  accepting  its 
substantial  accuracy.  But  in  other  cases,  the  substitution 
has  gone  further  still  ;  instead  of  criminals,  recusants,  or 
heretics,  we  get  an  animal  victim  in  place  of  the  human 
one.     Mr.  St.  John  saw  a  chicken  sacrificed  for  a  slave 


SUBSTITUTED  VICTIMS. 


253 


girl  at  a  building  among  the  Dyaks  of  Borneo.  A  lamb 
was  walled-in  under  the  altar  of  a  church  in  Denmark,  to 
make  it  stand  fast ;  or  the  churchyard  was  hanselled  by 
burying  first  a  live  horse,  an  obvious  parallel  to  the  case 
of  St  Oran.  When  the  parish  church  of  Chumleigh  in 
Devonshire  was  taken  down  a  few  years  ago,  in  a  wall  of 
the  fifteenth  century  was  found  a  carved  figure  of  Christ, 
crucified  to  a  vine — a  form  of  substitution  to  which  we 
shall  find  several  equivalents  later.  In  modern  Greece, 
says  Dr.  Tylor,  to  whom  I  owe  many  of  these  instances, 
a  relic  of  the  idea  survives  in  the  belief  that  the  first 
passer-by  after  a  foundation-stone  is  laid  will  die  within 
the  year  ;  so  the  masons  compromise  the  matter  by  killing 
a  cock  or  a  black  lamb  on  the  foundation-stone.  This 
animal  then  becomes  the  spirit  of  the  building. 

We  shall  see  reason  to  suspect,  as  we  proceed,  that  every 
slaughtered  victim  in  every  rite  was  at  first  a  divine-human 
being  ;  and  that  animal  victims  are  always  substitutes, 
though  supposed  to  be  equally  divine  with  the  man-god 
they  personate.  I  will  ask  the  reader  to  look  out  for  such 
cases  as  we  proceed,  and  also  to  notice,  even  when  I  do 
not  call  attention  to  them,  the  destination  of  the  oracular 
head,  and  the  frequent  accompaniment  of  "  clanging 
music." 

Elsewhere  we  find  other  customs  which  help  to  explain 
these  curious  survivals.  The  shadow  is  often  identified 
with  the  soul  ;  and  in  Roumania,  when  a  new  building  is 
to  be  erected,  the  masons  endeavour  to  catch  the  shadow 
of  a  passing  stranger,  and  then  lay  the  foundation-stone 
upon  it.  Or  the  stranger  is  enticed  by  stealth  to  the 
stone,  when  the  mason  secretly  measures  his  body  or  his 
shadow,  and  buries  the  measure  thus  taken  under  the 
foundation.  Here  we  have  a  survival  of  the  idea  that  the 
victim  must  at  least  be  not  unwilling.  It  is  believed  that 
the  person  thus  measured  will  languish  and  die  within 
forty  days  ;  and  we  may  be  sure  that  originally  the  belief 
ran  that  his  soul  became  the  god  or  guardian  spirit  of  the 


254 


THE  MANUIACTUHE  OF  GODS. 


i         '  ! 


it^iT 


'  i- 

4 


t ' 


edifice.  If  the  Bulgarians  cannot  get  a  human  shadow 
to  wall  in,  they  content  themselves  with  the  shadow  of  the 
first  animal  that  passes  by.  Here  again  we  get  that  form 
of  divine  chance  in  the  pointing  out  of  a  victim  which  is 
seen  in  the  case  of  Jephtha's  daughter.  Still  milder  sub- 
stitutions occur  in  the  empty  coffin  walled  into  a  cluirch 
in  Germany,  or  the  rude  images  of  babies  in  swaddling- 
clothes  similarly  immured  in  Holland.  The  last  trace  of 
the  custom  is  found  in  England  in  the  modern  practice  of 
putting  coins  and  newspapers  under  the  foundation-stone. 
Here  it  would  seem  as  if  the  victim  were  regarded  as  a 
sacrifice  to  the  Earth  (a  late  and  derivative  idea),  and  the 
coins  were  a  money  payment  in  lieu  of  the  human  or 
animal  offering.  I  owe  many  of  the  cases  here  instanced 
to  the  careful  research  of  my  friend  Mr.  Clodd.  But  since 
this  chapter  was  written,  all  other  treatises  on  the  subject 
hav'.;  been  superseded  by  Mr.  Speth's  exhaustive  and 
schr'  rly  pamphlet  on  **  Builder's  Rites  and  Ceremonies," 
a  few  examples  from  which  I  have  intercalated  in  my  ar- 
gument. 

Other  implications  must  be  briefly  treated.  The  best 
ghost  or  god  for  this  purpose  seems  to  be  a  divine  or 
kingly  person  ;  and  in  stages  when  the  meaning  of  the 
practice  is  still  quite  clear  to  the  builders,  the  dearly-be- 
loved son  or  wife  of  the  king  is  often  selected  for  the  honour 
of  tutelary  godship.  Later  this  notion  passes  into  the 
sacrifice  of  the  child  or  wife  of  the  master  mason  ;  many 
legends  or  traditions  contain  this  more  recent  element. 
In  Vortigern's  case,  however,  the  child  is  clearly  a  divine 
being,  as  we  shall  see  to  be  true  a  little  later  on  in  certain 
Semitic  instances.  To  the  last,  the  connexion  of  children 
with  such  sacrifices  is  most  marked  ;  thus  when  in  1813 
the  ice  on  the  Elbe  broke  down  one  of  the  dams,  an  old 
peasant  sneered  at  the  efforts  of  the  Government  engineer, 
saying  to  him,  "  You  will  never  get  the  dyke  to  hold  unless 
you  first  sink  an  innocent  child  under  the  foundations." 
Here  the  very  epithet  "  innocent "  in  itself  reveals  some 


TOWN  AND   VILLAGE  GODS. 


255 


last  echo  of  godship.  So  too,  in  1843,  when  a  new  bridge 
was  to  be  built  at  Halle  in  Germany,  the  people  told  the 
architects  that  the  pier  would  not  stand  unless  a  living  child 
was  immured  under  the  foundations,  Schrader  says  that 
when  the  great  railway  bridge  over  th(  Ganges  was  begun, 
every  mother  in  Bengal  trembled  for  her  infant.  The 
Slavonic  chiefs  who  founded  Detinez  **  sent  out  men  to 
catch  the  first  boy  they  met  and  bury  him  in  the  founda- 
tion." Here  once  more  we  have  the  sacred-chance  victim. 
Briefly  I  would  say  there  seems  to  be  a  preference  in  all 
such  cases  for  children,  and  especially  for  girls  ;  of  kingly 
stock,  if  possible,  but  at  least  a  near  relation  of  the  master 
builder. 

Mr.  Speth  points  out  that  horses'  heads  were  frequently 
fastened  on  churches  or  other  buildings,  and  suggests 
that  they  belong  to  animal  foundation-victims.  This  use 
of  the  skull  is  in  strict  accordance  with  its  usual  oracular 
destination. 

Some  notable  historical  or  mythical  tales  of  town  and 
village  gods,  deliberately  manufactured,  may  now  be  con- 
sidered. We  read  in  First  Kings  that  when  Hiel  the 
Bethelite  built  Jericho,  "  he  laid  the  foundation  thereof  in 
Abiram  his  first-born,  and  set  up  the  gates  thereof  in  his 
youngest  Segub."  Here  we  see  evidently  a  princely 
master  builder,  sacrificing  his  own  two  sons  as  guardian 
gods  of  his  new  city.  Abundant  traces  exist  of  such  de- 
liberate production  of  a  Fortune  for  a  town.  And  it  is 
also  probable  that  the  original  sacrifice  was  repeated 
annually,  as  if  to  keep  up  the  constant  stream  of  divine 
life,  somewhat  after  the  fashion  of  the  human  gods  we  had 
to  consider  in  the  last  chapter.  Dido  appears  to  have 
been  the  Fortune  or  foundation-goddess  of  Carthage ;  she 
is  represented  in  the  legend  as  the  foundress-queen,  and  is 
said  to  have  lept  into  her  divine  pyre  from  the  walls  of 
her  palace.  But  the  annual  human  sacrifice  appears  to 
have  been  performed  at  the  same  place  ;  for  "  It  can 
hardly  be  doubted,"   says   Professor  Robertson   Smith, 


256 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


'  ( 


'        :| 


"  that  the  spot  at  which  legend  placed  the  self-sacrifice  of 
Dido  to  her  husband  Sicharbas  was  that  at  which  the  later 
Carthaginian  human  sacrifices  were  performed."  At 
Laodicea,  again,  an  annual  sacrifice  took  place  of  a  deer, 
in  lieu  of  a  maiden  ;  and  this  sacrifice,  we  are  expressly 
told,  was  offered  to  the  goddess  of  the  city.  Legend  said 
that  the  goddess  was  a  maiden,  who  had  been  similarly 
sacrificed  to  consecrate  the  foundation  of  the  town,  and 
was  thenceforth  worshipped  as  its  Fortune,  like  Dido  at 
Carthage  ;  "  it  was  therefore  the  death  of  the  goddess 
herself,"  says  Professor  Robertson  Smith,  "  that  was 
annually  renewed  in  the  piacular  ^  e."  (I  do  not  admit 
the  justice  of  the  epithet  "  piacular.")  Again,  Malalas 
tells  us  that  the  22d  of  May  was  kept  at  Antioch  as  the 
anniversary  of  a  maiden  sacrificed  at  the  foundation  of  the 
city,  and  worshipped  thereafter  as  the  Tyche,  or  luck,  of 
the  town.  At  Durna  in  Arabia  an  annual  victim  was 
similarly  buried  under  the  stone  which  formed  the  altar. 

In  most  of  the  legends,  as  they  come  down  to  us  from 
civilised  and  lettered  antiquity,  the  true  nature  of  this 
sanguinary  foundation-rite  is  overlaid  and  disguised  by 
later  rationalising  guesses  ;  and  I  may  mention  that  Dr. 
Robertson  Smith  in  particular  habitually  treats  the  ration- 
alising guesses  as  primitive,  and  the  real  old  tradition  of 
the  slaughtered  virgin  as  a  myth  of  explanation  of  "  the 
later  Euhemeristic  Syrians."  But  after  the  examples  we 
have  already  seen  of  foundation-gods,  I  think  I  can  hardly 
be  doubted  that  this  is  to  reverse  the  true  order  ;  that  a 
girl  was  really  sacrificed  for  a  tutelary  deity  when  a  town 
was  founded,  and  that  the  substitution  of  an  animal  victim 
at  the  annual  renewal  was  a  later  refinement.  Mr.  Speth 
quotes  a  case  in  point  of  a  popular  tradition  that  a  young 
girl  had  been  built  into  the  castle  of  Nieder-Manderschied ; 
and  when  the  wall  was  opened  in  1844,  the  Euhemeristic 
workmen  found  a  cavity  enclosing  a  human  skeleton.  I 
would  suggest,  again,  that  in  the  original  legend  of  the 
foundation  of  Rome,  Romulus  was  represented  as  having 


'  V 

*      Q  > 


THE  RITUAL  OP  GOD  MAKING. 


257 


Ic 

ll 


built-in  his  brother  Remus  as  a  Fortune,  or  god,  of  tlie  city, 
and  that  to  this  identification  of  Remus  with  the  city  we 
ought  to  trace  such  phrases  as  turha  Rcmi  for  the  Roman 
people.  The  word  forum  in  its  primitive  signification 
means  the  empty  space  left  before  a  tomb — the  llan  or 
tcmcnos.  Hence  I  would  suggest  that  the  Roman  Forum 
and  other  Latin  fora  were  really  the  tomb-enclosures  of 
the  original  foundation-victims.*  So,  too,  the  English 
village  green  and  "play-field"  are  probal)ly  the  space  dedi- 
cated to  the  tribal  or  village  god — a  slain  man-god  ;  and 
they  are  usually  connected  with  the  sacred  stone  and 
sacred  tree.  I  trust  this  point  will  become  clearer  as  we 
proceed,  and  develop  the  whole  theory  of  the  foundation 
god  or  goddess,  the  allied  sacred  stone  and  the  tree  or 
trunk  memorial. 

For,  if  I  am  right,  the  entire  primitive  ritual  of  the  foun- 
dation of  a  village  consisted  in  killing  or  burying  alive  or 
building  into  the  wall  a  human  victim,  as  town  or  village 
god,  and  raising  a  stone  and  planting  a  tree  close  by  to 
commemorate  him.  At  these  two  monuments  the  village 
rites  were  thereafter  performed.  The  stone  and  tree  are 
thus  found  in  their  usual  conjunction  ;  both  coexist  in  the 
Indian  village  to  the  present  day,  as  in  the  Siberian  wood- 
land or  the  Slavonic  forest.  Thus,  at  Rome,  we  have  not 
only  the  legend  of  the  death  of  Remus,  a  prince  of  the 
blood-royal  of  Alba  Longa,  intimately  connected  with  the 
building  of  the  wall  of  Roma  Quadrata,  but  we  have  also 
the  sacred  fig-tree  of  Romulus  in  the  Forum,  which  was 
regarded  as  the  embodiment  of  the  city  life  of  the  com- 
bined Rome,  so  that  when  it  showed  signs  of  withering, 
consternation  spread  through  the  city  ;  and  hard  by  we 
have  the  sacred  stone  or  Palladium,  guarded  by  the  sacred 
Vestal  Virgins  who  kept  the  city  hearth-fire,  and  still  more 
closely  bound  up  with  the  fortune  of  that  secondary  Rome 
which  had  its  home  in  the  Forum.     Are  not  these  three 

•  In  the  case  of  Rome,  the  Forum  would  represent  the  grave  of  the 
later  foundation-god  of  tlie  compound  Latin  and  Sabine  city. 


258 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


M    'lli 


the  triple  form  of  the  foundation-god  of  that  united 
Capitoline  and  Palatine  Rome  ?  And  may  not  the  sacred 
cornel  on  the  Palatine,  again,  have  been  similarly  the  holy 
foundation-tree  of  that  older  Roma  Quadrata  which  is 
more  particularly  associated  with  the  name  of  Romulus  ? 
Of  this  tree  Plutarch  tells  us  that  when  it  appeared  to  a 
passer-by  to  be  drooping,  he  set  up  a  hue  and  cry,  which 
was  soon  responded  to  by  people  on  all  sides  rushing  up 
with  buckets  of  water  to  pour  upon  it,  as  if  they  were 
hastening  to  put  out  s  fire.  Clearly,  here  again  we  have 
to  deal  with  an  embodied  Fortune. 

We  do  not  often  get  all  three  of  these  Fortunes  com- 
bined— the  human  victim,  the  stone,  and  the  tree,  with  the 
annual  oflfering  which  renews  its  sanctity.  But  we  find 
traces  so  often  of  one  or  other  of  the  trio  that  we  are 
justified,  I  think,  in  connecting  them  together  as  parts  of  a 
whole,  whereof  here  one  element  survives,  and  there 
another.  "  Among  all  primitive  communities,"  says  Mr. 
Gomme,  "  when  a  village  was  first  established,  a  stone 
was  set  up.  To  this  stone,  the  headman  of  the  village 
made  an  offering  once  a  year."  To  the  present  day, 
London  preserves  her  foundation-god  in  the  shape  of 
London  Stone,  now  enclosed  in  a  railing  or  iron  grill  just 
opposite  Cannon  Street  Station.  Now,  London  Stone 
was  for  ages  considered  as  the  representative  and  embodi- 
ment of  the  entire  community.  Proclamations  and  other 
important  state  businesses  were  announced  from  its  top  ; 
and  the  defendant  in  trials  in  the  Lord  Mayor's  court  was 
summoned  to  att«md  from  London  Stone,  as  though  the 
stone  itself  spoke  to  the  wrong-doer  with  the  united  voice 
of  the  assembled  citizens.  The  first  Lord  Mayor,  indeed, 
was  Henry  de  Lundonstone,  no  doubt,  as  Mr.  Loftie  sug- 
gests, the  hereditary  keeper  of  this  urban  fetish, — in  short, 
the  representative  of  the  village  headman.  I  have  written 
at  greater  length  on  the  implications  of  this  interesting 
relic  in  an  article  on  London  Stone  in  Longmans'  Maga- 
zine, to  which  I  would  refer  the  reader  for  further  informa- 


i  I 


^p 


SACRIFICE  OF  THE  KING'S  SON. 


259 


In 


tion.  I  will  only  add  here  the  curious  episode  of  Jack 
Cade,  who,  when  he  forced  his  way,  under  his  assumed 
name  of  Mortimer,  into  the  city  in  1450,  first  of  all  pro- 
ceeded to  this  sacred  relic,  the  embodiment  of  palladium 
of  ancient  London,  and  having  struck  it  with  his  sword 
exclaimed,  "  Now  is  Mortimer  lord  of  this  city." 

A  similar  sacred  stone  exists  to  this  day  at  Bovey 
Tracey  in  Devon,  of  which  Ormerod  tells  us  that  the 
mayor  of  Bovey  used  to  ride  round  it  on  the  first  day  of 
his  tenure  of  office,  and  strike  it  with  a  stick, — ^which 
further  explains  Jack  Cade's  proceeding.  According  to 
the  Totnes  Times  of  May  13,  1882,  the  young  men  of 
the  town  were  compelled  on  the  same  day  to  kiss  the 
magic  stone  and  pledge  allegiance  in  upholding  the 
ancient  rights  and  privileges  of  Bovey.  (I  owe  these  de- 
tails to  Mr.  Lawrence  Gomme's  Village  Community.)  I 
do  not  think  we  can  dissociate  from  these  two  case*  the 
other  sacred  stones  of  Britain,  such  as  the  King's  btone 
at  Kingston  in  Surrey,  where  several  of  the  West  Saxon 
kings  were  crowned  ;  nor  the  Scone  Stone  in  the  coro- 
nation-chair at  Westminster  Abbey  ;  nor  the  Stone  of 
Clackmannan,  and  the  sacred  stones  already  mentioned 
in  a  previous  chapter  on  which  the  heads  of  clans  or  of 
Irish  septs  succeeded  to  the  chieftainship  of  their  respective 
families.  These  may  in  part  have  been  ancestral  and 
sepulchral  monuments  :  but  it  is  probable  that  they  also 
partook  in  part  of  this  artificial  and  factitious  sanctity. 
Certainly  in  some  cases  that  sanctity  was  renewed  by  an 
animal  sacrifice. 

With  these  fairly  obvious  instances  I  would  also  con- 
nect certain  other  statements  which  seem  to  me  to  have 
been  hitherto  misinterpreted.  Thus  Mesha,  king  of 
Moab,  when  he  is  close  beleaguered,  burns  his  son  as  a 
holocaust  on  the  wall  of  the  city.  Is  not  this  an  offering 
to  protect  the  wall  by  the  deliberate  inanufacture  of  an 
additional  deity  ?  For  straightv/ay  the  besiegers  seem  to 
feel  they  are  overpowered,  and  the  siege  is  raised.     Ob- 


M 


^' 


26o 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


I 


|i       ' 


serve  here  once  more  that  it  is  the  king's  own  dearly-be- 
loved son  who  is  chosen  as  victim.  Again,  at  Amathus, 
human  sacrifices  were  offered  to  Jupiter  Hospes  "  before 
the  gates";  and  this  Jupiter  Hospes,  as  Ovid  calls  him, 
is  the  Amathusian  Herakles  or  Malika,  whose  name,  pre- 
served for  us  by  Hesychius,  identifies  him  at  once  as  a 
local  deity  similar  to  the  Tyrian  Melcarth.  Was  not  this 
again,  therefore,  the  Fortune  of  the  city  ?  At  Tyre  itself, 
the  sepulchre  of  Herakles  Melcarth  was  shown,  where  he 
was  said  to  have  been  cremated.  For  among  cremating 
peoples  it  was  natural  to  burn,  not  slaughter,  the  yearly 
god-victim.  At  Tarsus,  once  more,  there  was  an  annual 
feast,  at  which  a  very  fair  pyre  was  erected,  and  the  local 
Herakles  or  Baal  was  burned  on  it  in  effigy.  We  cannot 
doubt,  I  think,  that  this  was  a  mitigation  of  an  earlier  hu- 
man holocaust.  Indeed,  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  says  of 
this  instance  :  "  This  annual  commemoration  of  the  death 
of  the  god  in  fire  must  have  its  origin  in  an  older  rite,  in 
which  the  victim  was  not  a  mere  effigy,  but  a  theanthropic 
sacrifice,  i.e.,  an  actual  man  or  sacred  animal,  whose  life, 
according  to  the  antique  conception  now  familiar  to  us, 
was  an  embodiment  of  the  divine-human  life."  This  is 
very  near  my  own  view  on  the  subject. 

From  these  instances  we  may  proceed,  I  think,  to  a 
more  curious  f=ct,  whose  implications  seem  to  me  to  have 
been  even  more  grievously  mistaken  by  later  interpreters. 
I  mean  the  case  of  children  of  kings  or  of  ruling  families, 
sacrificed  in  time  of  war  or  peril  as  additional  or  auxiliary 
deities.  Thus  Philo  of  By  bios  says:  "  It  was  an  ancient 
custom  in  a  crisis  of  great  danger  that  the  ruler  of  a  city 
or  nation  should  give  his  beloved  son  to  die  for  the  whole 
people,  as  a  ransom  offered  to  the  avenging  demons  ;  and 
the  children  thus  offered  were  slain  with  mystic  rites.  So 
Cronus,  whom  the  Phoenicians  call  Israel,  being  king  of 
the  land,  and  having  an  only-begotten  son  called  Jeoud 
(for  in  the  Phoenicians  tongue  Jeoud  signifies  only-begot- 
ten), dressed  him  in  royal  robes  and  sacrificed  him  upon 


SEMITIC  CHILD-SACRIFICE. 


.?6l 


an  altar  in  a  time  of  war,  when  the  country  was  in  great 
danger  from  tne  enemy."  I  do  not  think  Philo  is  right 
in  his  gloss  or  guess  about  "  the  avenging  demons  ";  but 
otherwise  his  story  is  interesting  evidence.  It  helps  us 
more  or  less  directly  to  connect  the  common  Phoenician 
and  Hebrew  child-sacrifices  with  this  deliberate  manu- 
facture of  artificial  gods.  I  do  not  doubt,  indeed,  that  the 
children  were  partly  sacrificed  to  pre-existent  and  well- 
defined  great  gods  ;  but  I  believe  also  that  the  practice 
first  arose  as  one  of  deliberate  manufacture  of  gods,  and 
retained  to  the  end  many  traces  of  its  origin. 

We  know  that  in  times  of  national  calamity  the  Phoe- 
nicians used  thus  to  sacrifice  their  dearest  to  Baal.  Phoeni- 
cian history,  we  know  from  Porphyry,  is  full  of  such  sacri- 
fices. When  the  Carthaginians  were  defeated  and  besieged 
by  Agathocles,  they  ascribed  their  disasters  to  the  anger  of 
the  god  ;  for  whereas  in  former  times  they  us(;d  to  sacri- 
fice to  him  their  own  children,  they  had  latterly  fallen  (as 
we  shall  see  hereafter  the  Khonds  did)  into  the  habit  of 
buying  children  and  rearing  them  as  victims.  So  two 
hundred  young  people  of  the  noblest  families  were  picked 
out  for  sacrifice  ;  and  these  were  accompanied  by  no  less 
than  three  hundred  more,  who  volunteered  to  die  for  the 
fatherland.  They  were  sacrificed  by  being  placed,  one  by 
one,  on  the  sloping  hands  of  the  brazen  image,  from  which 
they  rolled  into  a  pit  of  fire.  So  too  at  Jerusalem,  in 
moments  of  great  danger,  children  were  sacrificed  to  some 
Molech,  whether  Jahweh  or  another,  by  being  placed  in 
the  fiery  arms  of  the  image  at  the  Tophet.  I  will  admit 
that  in  these  last  cases  we  approach  very  near  to  the  mere 
piacular  human  sacrifice  ;  but  we  shall  see,  when  we  come 
to  deal  with  gods  of  cultivation,  and  the  doctrine  of  the 
atonement,  that  it  is  diflficult  to  draw  a  line  between  the 
two  ;  while  the  fact  that  a  dearly-beloved  or  only-begotten 
son  is  the  victim — especially  the  son  of  a  king  of  divine 
blood — links  such  cases  on  directly  to  the  more  obvious 
instances  of  deliberate  god-making.     Some  such  voluntary 


c,    J 


II   i 


262 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


\ 


(■ 


sacrifice  seems  to  me  to  be  commemorated  in  the  beautiful 
imagery  of  the  53d  of  Isaiah.  But  there  the  language  is 
distinctly  piacular. 

That  annual  human  sacrifices  originated  in  deliberate 
god-making  of  this  sort  is  an  inference  which  has  already 
been  almost  arrived  at  by  more  orthodox  thinkers. 
"  Among  the  Semites,"  says  Dr.  Robertson  Smiili.  '*  the 
most  current  view  of  annual  piacula  seems  to  have  been 
that  they  commemorate  a  divine  tragedy — the  death  of 
some  god  or  goddess.  The  origin  of  such  myths  is  easily 
explained  from  the  nature  of  the  ritual.  Originally,  the 
death  of  the  god  was  nothing  else  than  the  death  of  the 
theanthropic  victim  ;  but  when  this  ceased  to  be  under- 
stood, it  was  thought  that  the  piacular  sacrifice  represented 
an  historical  tragedy  in  which  the  god  was  killed."  But 
we  shall  see  hereafter  that  the  idea  of  expiation  in  sacrifice 
is  quite  a  late  and  derivative  one  ;  it  seems  more  probable 
that  the  victim  was  at  first  a  human  god,  for  whom  later 
an  animal  victim  was  substituted.  In  the  Athenian  Thar- 
gelia,  the  victims  were  human  to  the  very  end,  though 
undoubtedly  they  were  thought  of  as  bearing  vicariously 
the  sins  of  the  people.  We  shall  come  across  similar  in- 
trusions of  the  idea  of  expiation  in  later  chapters  ;  that 
idea  belongs  to  a  stage  of  thought  when  men  considered 
it  necessary  to  explain  away  by  some  ethical  reference  the 
sanguinary  element  of  primitive  ritual.  Thus  in  two 
Greek  towns,  as  we  learn  from  Pausanias — at  Potniae  and 
Patras, — an  annual  sacrifice  existed  which  had  once  been 
the  sacrifice  of  a  human  victim  ;  but  this  was  later  ex- 
plained as  an  expiation  of  an  ancient  crime  for  which 
satisfaction  had  to  be  made  from  generation  to  generation. 
Indeed,  as  a  rule,  later  ages  looked  upoii  the  murder  of 
a  god  as  obviously  criminal,  and  therefore  regarded  the 
slaughter  of  the  victim,  who  replaced  the  god,  as  being 
an  atonement  for  his  death,  instead  of  regarding  it  as  a 
deliberate  release  of  his  divine  spirit. 

I  have  dwelt  here  mainly  on  that  particular  form  of 


Pi  '  i 

(if        I     ! 


MAKING  A  GOD  FOR  SHIPS. 


263 


t 


artificial  god-making  which  is  concerned  with  the  founda- 
tion of  houses,  villages,  cities,  walls,  and  fortresses,  be- 
cause this  is  the  commonest  and  most  striking  case,  outside 
agriculture,  and  because  it  is  specially  connected  with  the 
world-wide  institution  of  the  village  or  city  god.  But 
other  types  occur  in  abundance  ;  and  to  them  a  few  lines 
must  now  be  devoted. 

When  a  ship  was  launched,  it  was  a  common  practice 
to  provide  her  with  a  guardian  spirit  or  god  by  making 
her  roll  over  the  body  of  a  human  victim.  The  Norwe- 
gian vikings  used  to  "  redden  their  rollers  "  with  human 
blood.  That  is  to  say,  when  a  warship  was  launched, 
human  victims  were  lashed  to  the  round  logs  over  which 
the  galley  was  run  down  to  the  sea,  so  that  the  stem  was 
sprinkled  with  their  spurting  blood.  Thus  the  victim  was 
incorporated,  as  it  were,  in  the  very  planks  of  the  vessel. 
Captain  Cook  found  the  South  Sea  Islanders  similarly 
christening  their  war-canoes  with  blood.  In  1784,  says 
Mr.  William  Simpson,  at  the  launching  of  one  of  the  Bey 
of  Tripoli's  cruisers,  "  a  black  slave  was  led  forward  and 
fastened  at  the  prow  of  the  vessel  to  influence  a  happy 
reception  in  the  ocean."  And  Mr.  Speth  quotes  a  news- 
paper account  of  the  sacrifice  of  a  sheep  when  the  first 
caique  for  "  Constantinople  at  Olympia  "  was  launched  in 
the  Bosphorus.  In  many  other  cases,  it  is  noted  that  a 
victim,  human  or  animal,  is  slaughtered  at  the  launching 
of  a  ship.  Our  own  ceremony  of  breaking  a  bottle  of 
wine  over  the  bows  is  the  last  relic  of  this  barbarous 
practice.  Here  as  elsewhere  red  wine  does  duty  for 
blood,  in  virtue  of  its  colour.  I  do  not  doubt  that  the 
images  of  gods  in  the  bow  of  a  ship  were  originally  idols 
in  which  the  spirits  thus  liberated  might  dwell,  and  that 
it  was  to  them  the  sailors  prayed  for  assistance  in  storm 
or  peril.  The  god  was  bound  up  in  the  very  fabric  of  the 
vessel.  The  modern  figure-head  still  represents  these 
gods  ;  figure-heads  essentially  similar  to  the  domestic 
idols  occur  on  New  Zealand  and  Polynesian  war-canoes. 


264 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


11: 


M 


li 


^n 


M 


i  It:  f 


"llWi 


The  ranoes  of  the  '"olomon  Islanders,  for  example,  "  often 
have  r.3  figure-heac  a  carved  representation  of  the  upper 
half  of  a  man,  who  holds  in  his  hands  a  human  head." 
This  head,  known  as  the  "  canoe-god  "  or  "  charm,"  "  rep- 
resents the  life  taken  when  the  canoe  was  first  used."  A 
canoe  of  importance  "  required  a  life  for  its  inauguration," 
says  Dr.  Codrington. 

Another  curious  instance  is  to  be  found  in  the  customs 
and  beliefs  regarding  river  gods.  Rivers,  I  have  sug- 
gested, are  often  divine  because  they  spring  near  or  are 
connected  with  the  grave  of  a  hero.  But  often  their  di- 
vinity has  been  deliberately  given  them,  and  is  annually 
renewed  by  a  god-making  sacrifice:  just  as  at  the  Jewish 
Passover  an  annual  animal-victim  was  slain,  and  his  blood 
smeared  on  the  lintels,  as  a  renewal  of  the  foundation 
sacrifice.  The  best  instance  I  have  found  of  this  curious 
custom  is  one  cited  by  Mr.  Gomme  from  Major  Ellis. 
Along  the  banks  of  the  Prah  in  West  Africa  there  are 
many  deities,  all  bearing  the  common  name  of  Prah,  and 
all  regarded  as  spirits  of  the  river.  At  each  town  or  con- 
siderable village  along  the  stream,  a  sacrifice  is  held  on  a 
day  about  the  middle  of  October.  The  usual  sacrifice 
was  two  human  adults,  one  male  and  one  female.  The 
inhabitants  of  each  village  believe  in  a  separate  spirit  of 
the  Prah,  who  resides  in  some  part  of  the  river  close  to 
their  own  hamlet.  Everywhere  along  the  river  the  priests 
of  these  gods  officiate  in  groups  of  three,  two  male  and 
one  female,  an  arrangement  which  is  peculiar  to  the  river 
gods.  Here,  unless  I  mistake,  we  have  an  obvious  case 
of  deliberate  god-making. 

This  savage  instance,  and  others  like  it,  which  space 
precludes  me  from  detailing,  suggest  the  conclusion  that 
many  river  gods  are  of  artificial  origin.  The  Wohhanda 
in  Esthonia  received  offerings  of  little  children,  whom  we 
:uay  fairly  compare  with  the  children  immured  in  buildings 
or  offered  to  the  Molech.     Many  other  rivers  spontan- 


l» 


b 


^ 


l 


v!»""r-  "-"*' 


h 


I 


MAKING  A  RI7ER-G0D. 


265 


eously  take  their  victim  annuallj^  ;  thus  the  Devonshire 
rhyme  goes, — 

River  of  Dart,  river  0/  Dart, 
Every  year  thou  clainiest  a  heart. 

The  Spey  also  takes  one  Hfe  each  year,  and  so  do  several 
British  rivers  elsewhere.  Origina^y,  no  doubt,  the  victim 
was  deliberately  chosen  and  slain  annually  ;  but  later  on, 
as  a  mitigation  of  the  custom,  the  river  itself  seems  to  have 
selected  its  own  spirit  by  divine  chance,  such  as  we  have 
already  seen  in  action  more  than  once  in  the  earlier  cases. 
In  other  words,  if  a  passer-by  happened  to  be  accidentally 
drowned,  he  was  accepted  in  place  of  a  deliberate  victim.* 
Hence  the  danger  of  rescuing  a  man  from  drowning  ;  you 
interfere  with  the  course  of  divine  selection,  and  you  will 
pay  for  it  yourself  by  being  the  next  victim.  "  When,  in 
the  Solomon  Islands,  a  man  accidentally  falls  into  a  river, 
and  a  shark  attacks  him,  he  is  not  allowed  to  escape.  If 
he  succeeds  in  eluding  the  shark,  his  fellow-tribesmen 
throw  him  back  to  his  doom,  believing  him  to  be  marked 
out  for  sacrifice  to  the  god  of  the  river."  Similarly,  in 
Britain  itself,  the  Lancashire  Ribble  has  a  water-spirit 
called  Peg  o'  Nell,  represented  by  a  stone  image,  now 
headless,  which  stands  at  the  spring  where  the  river  rises 
in  the  grounds  of  Waddon.  (Compare  the  Adonis  tomb 
and  grove  by  the  spring  at  Aphaca.)  This  Peg  o'  Nell 
was  originally,  according  to  tradition,  a  girl  of  the  neigh- 
bourhood ;  but  she  was  done  to  death  by  incantations, 
and  now  demands  every  seven  years  that  a  Hfe  should  be 
quenched  in  the  waters  of  the  Ribble.  When  "  Peg's 
night "  came  round  at  the  close  of  the  septennate,  unless 
a  bird,  a  cat,  or  a  dog  was  drowned  in  the  river,  it  was 
sure  to  claim  its  human  victim.  This  name  of  Peg  is 
evidently  a  corruption  of  some  old  local  Celtic  or  pre-Celtic 

*Here  is  an  analogue  in  '^'^ndation  sacrifices.  A  house  was  being 
built  at  Hind  Head  while  this  book  was  in  progress.  A  workman  fell 
from  a  l  *am  and  was  killed.  The  other  workmen  declared  this  was 
luck  for  the  house  and  would  ensure  its  stability. 


\^-'\ 


I 

1  '' 

!'.i 

\ 

I'i 

i 

1 

266 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


word  for  a  nymph  or  water-spirit  ;  for  there  is  another 
Peg  in  the  Tees,  known  as  Peg  Powler  ;  and  children 
used  there  to  be  warned  against  playing  on  the  banks  of 
the  stream,  for  fear  Peg  should  drag  them  into  the  water. 
Such  traces  of  a  child-sacrifice  are  extremely  significant. 

I  cannot  do  more  than  suggest  here  in  passing  that  we 
have  in  these  stories  and  practices  the  most  probable  origin 
of  the  common  myth  which  accounts  for  the  existence  of 
river  gods  or  river  nymphs  by  some  episode  of  a  youth 
or  maiden  drowned  there.  Arethusa  is  the  example  that 
occurs  to  everyone.  Grossly  Euhemeristic  as  it  may 
sound  to  say  so,  I  yet  believe  that  such  myths  of  meta- 
morphosis have  their  origin  in  the  deliberate  manufacture 
of  a  water-deity  by  immolation  in  the  stream  ;  and  that 
the  annual  renewal  of  such  a  sacrifice  was  <iue  in  part  to 
the  desire  to  keep  alive  the  memory  of  the  gods — to  be 
sure  they  were  there,  to  make  them  "  fresh  and  fresh,"  if 
one  may  venture  to  say  so — and  in  part  to  the  analogy 
of  those  very  important  artificial  gods  of  agriculture  whose 
origin  and  meaning  we  have  still  to  consider.  I  would 
add  that  the  commonness  of  sea-horses  and  river-horses 
in  the  mythology  of  the  world  doubtless  owes  its  origin 
partly  to  the  natural  idea  of  "  white  horses  "  on  the  waves, 
but  partly  also  to  the  deliberate  sacrifice  of  horses  to  the 
sea  or  rivers,  which  this  notion  suggested,  and  which 
tended  to  intensify  it.  It  is  as  though  the  worshipper 
wished  to  keep  up  a  continuous  supply  of  such  divine  and 
ghostly  steeds.  At  Rhodes,  for  example,  four  horses  were 
annually  cast  into  the  sea  ;  and  I  need  hardly  refer  to  the 
conventional  horses  of  Poseidon  and  Neptune.  The 
Ugly  Bum  in  Ross-shire  is  the  abode  of  a  water-horse;  in 
the  remains  of  the  Roman  temple  at  Lydney,  the  god 
Nodens,  who  represents  the  Severn,  is  shown  in  the  mosaic 
pavement  as  drawn  in  a  chariot  by  four  horses  ;  and  the 
Yore,  near  Middleham,  is  still  infested  by  a  water-horse 
who  annually  claims  at  least  one  human  victim.  Else- 
where other  animals  take  the  place  of  the  horse.     The 


MANUFACTURED  WAR-GODS. 


267 


Ostyaks  sacrifice  to  the  river  Ob  by  casting  in  a  live  rein- 
deer when  fish  are  scanty. 

I  do  not  deny  that  in  many  of  these  cases  two  distinct 
ideas — the  eariier  idea  of  the  victim  as  future  god,  and  the 
later  idea  of  the  victim  as  prey  or  sacrifice — have  got 
inextricably  mixed  up  ;  but  I  do  think  enough  has  been 
said  to  suggest  the  probability  that  many  river-gods  are 
artificially  produced,  and  that  this  is  in  large  part  the 
origin  of  nymphs  and  kelpies.  Legend,  indeed,  almost 
always  represents  them  so  ;  it  is  only  our  mythologists, 
with  their  blind  hatred  of  Euhemerism,  who  fail  to  per- 
ceive the  obvious  implication.  And  that  even  the  ac- 
cidental victim  was  often  envisaged  as  a  rive''-god,  after 
his  death,  we  see  clearly  from  the  Bohemian  custom  of 
going  to  pray  on  the  river  bank  where  a  man  has  been 
drowned,  and  casting  into  the  river  a  loaf  of  new  bread 
and  a  pair  of  wax  candles,  obvious  offerings  to  his  spirit. 

Many  other  classes  of  manufactured  gods  seem  to  me  to 
exist,  whose  existence  I  must  here  pass  over  almost  in  si- 
lence. Such  are  the  gods  produced  at  the  beginning  of 
a  war,  by  human  or  other  sacrifice  ;  gods  intended  to  aid 
the  warriors  in  their  coming  enterprise  by  being  set  free 
from  fleshly  bonds  for  that  very  purpose.  Thus,  accord- 
ing to  Phylarchus,  a  human  sacrifice  was  at  one  time 
customary  in  Greece  at  the  beginning  of  hostilities  ;  and 
we  know  that  as  late  as  the  age  of  Themistocles  three 
captives  were  thus  oflfered  up  before  the  battle  of  Salamis. 
The  sacrifice  of  iphigenia  is  a  good  legendary  case  in 
point,  because  it  is  one  of  a  virgin,  a  princess,  the  daughter 
of  the  leader,  and  therefore  a  typical  release  of  a  divine 
or  royal  spirit.  Here,  as  usual,  later  philosophising  repre- 
sents the  act  as  an  expiation  for  mortal  guilt  ;  but  we 
may  be  sure  the  original  story  contained  no  such  ethical 
or  piacular  element.  Among  the  early  Hebrews,  the  sum- 
mons to  a  war  seems  similarly  to  have  been  made  by 
sending  round  pieces  of  the  human  victim  ;  in  later 
Hebrew  usage,  this  rite  declines  into  the  sacrifice  of  a 


268 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OP  GODS. 


:    r 

:  i- : 


,  t 


f; 

1;  ■ 

1 

.    ;* 

■ 

!! 

L'  •• 

m 

m 

L 

burnt  offering  ;  though  we  get  an  intermediate  stage 
when  Saul  sends  round  portions  of  a  slaughtered  ox,  as 
the  Levite  in  Judges  had  sent  round  the  severed  limbs  of 
his  concubine  to  rouse  the  Israelites.  In  Africa,  a  war  is 
still  opened  with  a  solemn  sacrifice,  human  or  otherwise  ; 
and  Mr.  H.  O.  Forbes  gives  a  graphic  account  of  the 
similar  ceremony  which  precedes  an  expedition  in  the 
island  of  Timor. 

In  conclusion,  I  will  only  say  that  a  great  many  other 
obscure  rites  or  doubtful  legends  seem  to  me  explicable 
by  similai"  deliberate  exercises  of  god-making.  How 
common  such  sacrifice  was  in  agricultural  relations  we 
shall  see  in  the  sequel  ;  but  I  believe  that  even  in  other 
fields  of  life  future  research  will  so  explain  many  other 
customs.  The  self-immolation  of  Codrus,  of  Sardanapa- 
lus,  of  P.  Decius  Mus,  as  of  so  many  other  kings  or  heroes 
or  gods  or  goddesses  ;  the  divine  beings  who  fling  them- 
selves from  cliffs  into  the  sea  ;  M.  Curtius  devoting  him- 
self in  the  gulf  in  the  Forum  ;  the  tombs  of  the  lovers 
whom  Semiramis  buried  alive;  all  these,  I  take  it,  have 
more  or  less  similar  implications.  Even  such  tales  as  that 
of  T.  Manlius  Torquatus  and  his  son  must  be  assimilated, 
I  think,  to  the  story  of  the  king  of  Moab  killing  his  son 
on  the  wall,  or  to  that  of  the  Carthaginians  offering  up 
their  children  to  the  offended  deity  ;  only,  in  later  times, 
the  tale  was  misinterpreted  and  used  to  point  the  sup- 
posed moral  of  the  stern  and  inflexible  old  Roman  disci- 
pline. 

Frequent  reiteration  of  sacrifices  seems  necessary,  also, 
in  order  to  keep  up  the  sanctity  of  images  and  sacred  rites 
— to  put,  as  it  were,  a  new  soul  into  them.  Thus,  rivers 
needed  a  fresh  river-god  every  year  ;  and  recently  in 
Ashantee  it  was  discovered  that  a  fetish  would  no  longer 
"  work  "  unless  human  victims  were  abundantly  immo- 
lated for  it. 

This  is  also  perhaps  the  proper  place  to  observe  that  just 
as  the   great   god   Baal   has   been   resolved   by   modern 


THE  GREAT  CODS  ARE  CLASSES. 


269 


scholarship  into  many  local  Baalii.»,  and  just  as  the  great 
god  Adonis  has  been  reduced  by  recent  research  in  each 
case  to  some  particular  Adon  or  lord  out  of  many,  so  each 
such  separate  deity,  artificially  manufactured,  though 
called  by  the  common  name  of  the  Prah  or  the  Tiber,  yet 
retains  to  the  last  some  distinct  identity.  In  fact,  the 
great  gods  appear  to  be  rather  classes  than  individuals. 
That  there  were  many  Nymphs  and  many  Fauni,  many 
Silvani  and  many  Martes,  has  long  been  known  ;  it  is  lie- 
ginning  to  be  clear  that  there  were  also  many  Saturns, 
many  Jupiters,  many  Junones,  many  Vestae.  Even  in 
Greece  it  is  'nore  than  probable  that  the  generalistd  names 
of  the  great  gods  were  given  in  later  ages  to  various  old 
sacred  stones  and  holy  sites  of  diverse  origin  :  the  real 
object  of  worship  was  in  each  case  the  spontaneous  or  arti- 
ficial god  ;  the  name  was  but  a  general  title  applied  in 
common,  perhaps  adjectivally,  to  several  such  separate 
deities.  In  the  Roman  pantheon,  this  principle  is  now 
quite  well  established  ;  in  the  Semitic  it  is  probable  ;  in 
most  others,  the  progress  of  modern  research  is  gradually 
leading  up  to  it.  Even  the  elemental  god^  themselves  do 
not  seem  in  their  first  origin  to  be  really  singular  ;  they 
grow,  apparently,  from  generalised  phrases,  like  our 
"  Heaven  "  and  "  Providence,"  applied  at  first  to  the  par- 
ticular deity  of  whom  at  the  moment  the  speaker  is  think- 
ing. The  Zeus  or  Jupiter  varies  with  the  locality.  Thus, 
when  the  Latin  praetor,  at  the  outbreak  of  the  Latin  war, 
defied  the  Roman  Jupiter,  we  may  be  sure  it  was  the 
actual  god  there  visible  before  him  at  whom  he  hurled 
his  sacrilegious  challenge,  not  the  idezA  deity  in  the  sky 
above  his  head.  Indeed,  we  now  know  that  each  village 
and  each  farm  had  a  Jovis  of  its  own,  regarded  as  essen- 
tially a  god  of  wine,  and  specially  worshipped  at  the  wine- 
feast  in  April,  when  the  first  cask  was  broached.  This 
individuality  of  the  gods  is  an  important  point  to  bear  in 
mind  ;  for  the  tendency  of  language  is  always  to  treat 
many  similar  deities  as  practically  identical,  especially  in 


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270 


THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  GODS. 


i;    ' 

1    •; 


late  and  etherealised  forms  of  religion.  And  mythologists 
have  made  the  most  of  this  syncretic  tendency. 

A  single  concrete  instance  will  help  to  make  this  general 
principle  yet  clearer.  Boundaries,  I  believe,  were  origi- 
nally put  under  the  charge  of  local  and  artificial  deities, 
by  slaughtering  a  human  victim  at  each  turning-point  in 
the  limits,  and  erecting  a  sacred  stone  on  the  spot  where 
he  died  to  preserve  his  memory.  Often,  too,  in  accord- 
ance with  the  common  rule,  a  sacred  tree  seems  to  have 
been  planted  beside  the  sacred  stone  monument.  Each 
such  victim  became  forthwith  a  boundary  god,  a  pro- 
tecting and  watching  spirit,  and  was  known  thenceforth 
as  a  Hermes  or  a  Terminus.  But  there  were  many 
Hermae  and  many  Termini,  not  in  Greece  and  Italy  alone, 
but  throughout  the  world.  Only  much  later  did  a  gen- 
eralised god,  Hermes  or  Terminus,  arise  from  the  union 
into  a  single  abstract  concept  of  all  these  separate  and 
individual  deities.  Once  more,  the  boundary  god  was 
renewed  each  year  by  a  fresh  victim.  Our  own  practice 
of  "  beating  the  bounds  "  appears  to  be  the  last  expiring 
relic  of  fuch  annual  sacrifices.  The  bounds  are  beaten, 
apparently,  in  order  to  expel  all  foreign  gods  or  hostile 
spirits  ;  the  boys  who  play  a  large  part  in  the  ceremony 
are  the  representatives  of  the  human  victims.  They  are 
whipped  at  each  terminus  stone,  partly  in  order  to  make 
them  shed  tears  as  a  rain-charm  (after  the  fashion  with 
which  Mr.  Frazer  has  made  us  familiar),  but  partly  also 
because  all  artificially-made  gods  are  scourged  or  tortured 
before  being  put  to  death,  for  some  reason  which  I  do  not 
think  we  yet  fully  understand.  The  rationalising  gloss 
that  the  beys  are  whipped  "  in  order  to  make  them  re- 
member the  boundaries  "  is  one  of  the  usual  shallow  ex- 
planations so  glibly  offered  by  the  eighteenth  century. 
The  fact  that  the  ceremony  takes  place  at  sacred  stones  or 
"  Gospel  oaks  "  sufficiently  proclaims  its  original  mean- 
ing. 

The  idea  underlying  Christian  martyrdom,  where  the 


lii    ' 


MARTYRDOM. 


271 


martyr  voluntarily  devotes  himself  or  herself  to  death  in 
order  to  gain  the  crown  and  palm  in  heaven,  is  essentially 
similar  to  the  self-immolation  of  the  artificial  gods,  and 
helps  to  explain  the  nature  of  such  self-sacrifice.  For 
Christianity  is  only  nominally  a  monotheistic  religion, 
and  the  saints  and  martyrs  form  in  it  practically  a  second- 
ary or  minor  rank  of  deities. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  point  of  view  of  the  god-slayers 
cannot  be  more  graphically  put  than  in  the  story  which 
Mr.  William  Simpson  relates  of  Sir  Richard  Burton. 
Burton,  it  seems,  was  exploring  a  remote  Mahommedan 
region  on  the  Indian  frontier,  and  in  order  to  do  so  with 
greater  freedom  and  ease  had  disguised  himself  as  a  fakir 
of  Islam.  So  great  was  his  knowledge  of  Muslim  devo- 
tions that  the  people  soon  began  to  entertain  a  great 
respect  for  him  as  a  most  holy  person.  He  was  congratu- 
lating himself  upon  the  success  of  his  disguise,  and  looking 
forward  to  a  considerable  stay  in  the  valley,  when  one 
night  one  of  the  elders  of  the  village  came  to  him 
stealthily,  and  begged  him,  if  he  valued  his  own  safety,  to 
go  away.  Burton  asked  whether  the  people  did  not  like 
him.  The  elder  answered,  yes  ;  that  was  the  root  of  the 
trouble.  They  had  conceived,  in  fact,  the  highest  possible 
opinion  of  his  exceptional  sanctity,  and  they  thought  it 
would  be  an  excellent  thing  for  the  village  to  possess  the 
tomb  of  so  holy  a  man.  So  they  were  casting  about  now 
how  they  could  best  kill  him.  Whether  this  particular 
story  is  true  or  not,  it  at  least  exhibits  in  very  vivid 
colours  the  state  of  mind  of  the  ordinary  god-slayer. 

Dr.  Tylor,  Mr.  Speth,  and  other  writers  on  foundation 
sacrifices  treat  them  as  springing  from  primitive  animism. 
To  me,  they  seem  rather  to  imply  the  exact  opposite. 
For  if  everything  has  already  a  soul  by  nature,  why  kill  a 
man  or  criminal  to  supply  it  with  one  ? 


Iv 


I 


1    .5 


272 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


CHAPTER   XIII. 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


m 

('4 


j;,-  ■■ 


'. 


By  far  the  most  interesting  in  the  curious  group  of  ar- 
tificially-made gods  are  those  which  are  sacrificed  in  con- 
nexion with  agriculture.  These  deities  appeal  to  us  from 
several  points  of  view.  In  the  firsc  place,  they  form, 
among  agricultural  races  as  a  whole,  the  most  important 
and  venerated  objects  of  worship.  In  the  second  place, 
it  is  largely  through  their  influence  or  on  their  analogy, 
as  I  believe,  that  so  many  other  artificial  gods  came  to  be 
renewed  or  sacrificed  annually.  In  the  third  place,  it  is 
the  gods  of  agriculture  who  are  most  of  all  slain  sacra- 
mentally,  whose  bodies  are  eaten  by  their  votaries  in  the 
shape  of  cakes  of  bread  or  other  foodstuffs,  and  whose 
blood  is  drunk  in  the  form  of  wine.  The  immediate  con- 
nexion of  these  sacramental  ceremonies  with  the  sacrifice 
of  the  mass,  and  the  identification  of  the  Christ  with  bread 
and  wine,  give  to  this  branch  of  our  enquiry  a  peculiar 
importance  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  evolution  of 
Christianity.  We  must  therefore  enter  at  some  little  length 
into  the  genesis  of  these  peculiar  and  departmental  gods, 
who  stand  so  directly  in  the  main  line  of  evolution  of  the 
central  divine  figure  in  the  Christian  religion. 

All  over  the  world,  wherever  cultivation  exists,  a  special 
class  c»f  corn-gods  or  grain-gods  is  found,  deities  of  the 
chief  foodstuff, — be  it  maize,  or  dates,  or  plantain,  or  rice 
— and  it  is  a  common  feature  of  all  these  gods  that  they 
are  represented  by  human  or  quasi-hrman  victims,  who 
are  annually  slain  at  the  time  of  sowing.    These  human 


THE  PARADOX  OF   TILLAGE. 


273 


gods  are  believed  to  reappear  once  more  in  the  form  of 
the  crop  that  rises  from  their  sacred  bodies  ;  their  death 
and  resurrection  are  celebrated  in  festivals  ;  and  they  are 
eaten  and  drunk  sacramentally  by  their  votaries,  in  the 
shape  of  firsi-fruits,  or  of  cakes  and  wine,  or  of  some  other 
embodiment  of  the  divine  being.  We  have  therefore  to 
enquire  into  the  origin  of  this  curious  superstition,  which 
involves,  as  it  seems  to  me,  the  very  origin  of  cultivation 
itself  as  a  human  custom.  And  I  must  accordingly  be- 
speak my  readers'  indulgence  if  I  diverge  for  a  while  into 
what  may  seem  at  first  a  purely  botanical  digression. 

Most  people  must  have  been  struck  by  the  paradox  of 
cultivation.  A  particular  plant  in  a  state  of  nature,  let  us 
say,  grows  and  thrives  only  in  water,  orin  some  exceedingly 
moist  and  damp  situation.  You  take  up  this  waterside 
plant  with  a  trowel  one  day,  and  transfer  it  incontinently 
to  a  dry  bed  in  a  sun-baked  garden  ;  when  lo  !  the 
moisture-loving  creature,  instead  of  withering  and  dying, 
as  one  might  naturally  expect  of  it,  begins  to  grow  apace, 
and  to  thrive  to  all  appearance  even  better  and  more 
lustily  than  in  its  native  habitat.  Or  you  remove  some 
parched  desert  weed  from  its  arid  rock  to  a  moist  and 
rainy  climate  ;  and  instead  of  dwindling,  as  one  imagines 
it  ought  to  do  under  the  altered  conditions,  it  spreads 
abroad  in  the  deep  rich  mould  of  a  shrubbery  bed,  and  at- 
tains a  stafure  impossible  to  its  kind  in  its  original  sur- 
roundings. Our  gardens,  i^  fact,  show  us  side  by  side 
plants  which,  in  the  wild  state,  demand  the  most  varied 
and  dissimilar  habitats.  Siberian  squills  blossom  amicably 
in  the  same  bed  with  Italian  tulips  ;  the  alpine  saxifrage 
spreads  its  purple  rosettes  in  friendly  rivalry  with  the  bog- 
loving  marsh-marigold  or  the  dry  Spanish  iris.  The 
question,  therefore,  sooner  or  later  occurs  to  the  enquiring 
mind  :  How  can  they  all  live  together  so  well  here  in 
man's  domain,  when  in  the  outside  world  each  demands 
and  exacts  so  extremely  different  and  specialised  a 
situation  ? 


{■•■ 


hi 


>J'I 


274 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


'I  ,* 


Of  course  it  is  only  an  inexperienced  biologist  who 
could  long  be  puzzled  by  this  apparent  paradox.  He  must 
soon  see  the  true  solution  of  the  riddle,  if  he  has  read  and 
digested  the  teachings  of  Darwin.  For  the  real  fact  is, 
in  a  garden  or  out  of  it,  most  of  these  plants  could  get  on 
very  well  in  a  great  variety  of  climates  or  situations — if 
only  they  were  protected  against  outside  competition. 
There  we  have  the  actual  crux  of  the  problem.  It  is  not 
that  the  moisture-loving  plants  cannot  live  in  dry  situa- 
tions, but  that  the  dry-loving  plants,  specialised  and 
adapted  for  the  post,  can  compete  with  them  there  at  an 
immense  advntage,  and  so,  in  a  very  short  iime,  live  them 
down  altogether.  Every  species  in  a  state  of  nature  is 
continually  exposed  to  the  ceaseless  competition  of  every 
other  ;  and  each  on  its  own  ground  can  beat  its  com- 
petitors. But  in  a  garden,  the  very  thing  we  aim  at  is 
just  to  restrict  and  prevent  competition  ;  to  give  each 
species  a  fair  chance  for  life,  even  in  conditions  where 
other  and  better-adapted  species  can  usually  outlive  it. 
This,  in  fact,  is  really  at  bottom  all  that  we  ever  mean  by 
a  garden — a  space  of  ground  cleared,  and  kept  clear,  of  its 
natural  vegetation  (commonly  called  in  this  connexion 
weeds),  and  deliberately  stocked  with  other  plants,  most 
or  all  of  which  the  weeds  would  live  down  if  not  artificially 
prevented. 

We  see  the  truth  of  this  point  of  view  the  moment  the 
garden  is,  as  we  say,  abandoned — that  is  to  say,  left  once 
more  to  the  operation  of  unaided  nature.  The  plants  with 
which  we  have  stocked  it  loiter  on  for  a  while  in  a  feeble 
and  uncertain  fashion,  but  are  ultimately  choked  out  by 
the  stronger  and  better-adapted  weeds  which  compose  the 
natural  vegetation  of  the  locality.  The  dock  and  nettle 
live  down  in  time  the  larkspur  and  the  peony.  The  es- 
sential thing  in  the  garden  is,  in  short,  the  clearing  of  the 
ground  from  the  weeds — that  is,  in  other  words,  from  the 
native  vegetation.  A  few  minor  things  may  or  may  not 
be  added,  such  as  manuring,  turning  the  soil,  protecting 


1  as- 


m 


ORIGIN  OF  CULTIVATION. 


275 


with  shelter,  and  so  forth  ;  but  the  clearing  is  itself  the 
one  thing  needful. 

Slight  as  this  point  seems  at  first  sight,  I  believe  it  in- 
cludes the  whole  secret  of  the  origin  of  tillage,  and  therefore, 
by  implication,  of  the  gods  of  agriculture.  For,  looked 
at  in  essence,  cultivation  is  weeding,  and  weeding  is  culti- 
vation. When  we  say  that  a  certain  race  cultivates  a 
certain  plant-staple,  we  mean  no  more  in  the  last  resort 
than  that  it  sows  or  sets  it  in  soil  artificially  cleared  of 
competing  species.  Sowing  without  clearing  is  abso- 
lutely useless.  So  the  question  of  the  origin  of  cultivation 
resolves  itself  at  last  simply  into  this — how  did  certain 
men  come  first  to  know  that  by  clearing  ground  of  weeds 
and  keeping  it  clear  of  them  they  could  promote  the 
growth  of  certain  desirable  human  foodstuffs  ? 

To  begin  with,  it  may  be  as  well  to  premise  that  the 
problem  of  the  origin  of  cultivation  is  a  far  more  complex 
one  than  appears  at  first  sight.  For  we  have  not  only  to. 
ask,  as  might  seem  to  the  enquirer  unaccustomed  to  such 
investigations,  "  How  did  the  early  savage  first  find  out 
that  seeds  would  grow  better  when  planted  in  open  soil, 
already  freed  from  weeds  or  natural  competitors  ?  "  but 
also  the  other  and  far  more  difficult  question,  "  How  did 
the  early  savage  ever  find  out  that  plants  would  grow  from 
seeds  at  all  ?  "  That,  I  take  it,  is  the  real  riddle  of  the 
situation,  and  it  is  one  which,  so  far  as  I  know,,  has  hitherto 
escaped  all  enquirers  into  the  history  and  origin  of  human 
progress. 

Fully  to  grasp  the  profound  nature  of  this  difficulty  we 
must  throw  ourselves  back  mentally  into  the  condition 
and  position  of  primitive  man.  We  ourselves  have  known 
so  long  and  so  familiarly  the  fact  that  plants  grow  from 
seeds — that  the  seed  is  the  essential  reproductive  part  of 
the  vegetable  organism — that  we  find  it  hard  to  unthink 
that  piece  of  commonplace  knowledge,  and  to  realise  that 
what  to  us  is  an  almost  self-evident  truth  is  to  the  primitive 
savage  a  long  and  difficult  inference.     Our  own  common 


V- ;  • . 


276 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


and  certain  acquaintance  with  the  fact,  indeed,  is  entirely 
derived  from  the  practice  of  agriculture.  We  have  seen 
seeds  sown  from  our  earliest  childhood.  But  before  agri- 
culture grew  up,  the  connexion  between  seed  and  seedling 
could  not  possibly  be  known  or  even  suspected  by  primi- 
tive man,  who  was  by  no  means  prone  to  make  abstract 
investigations  into  the  botanical  nature  or  physiological 
object  of  the  various  organs  in  the  herbs  about  him.  That 
the  seed  is  the  reproductive  part  of  the  plant  was  a  fact 
as  little  likely  in  itself  to  strike  him  as  that  the  stamens 
were  the  male  organs,  or  that  the  leaves  were  the  assimi- 
lative and  digestive  surfaces.  He  could  only  have  found 
out  that  plants  grew  from  seeds  by  the  experimental  pro- 
cess of  sowing  and  growing  them.  Such  an  experiment 
he  was  far  from  likely  ever  to  try  for  its  own  sake.  He 
must  have  been  led  to  it  by  some  other  and  accidental 
coincidence. 

Now  what  was  primitive  man  likely  to  know  and  ob- 
serve about  the  plants  around  him  ?  Primarily  one  thing 
only  :  that  some  of  them  were  edible,  and  some  were  not. 
There  you  have  a  distinction  of  immediate  interest  to  all 
humanity.  And  what  parts  of  plants  were  most  likely 
to  be  useful  to  him  in  this  respect  as  foodstuffs  ?  Those 
parts  which  the  plant  had  specially  filled  up  with  rich 
material  for  its  own  use  or  the  use  of  its  offspring.  The 
first  are  the  roots,  stocks,  bulbs,  corns,  or  tubers  in  which 
it  lays  by  foodstuffs  for  its  future  growth  ;  the  second 
are  the  seeds  which  it  produces  and  enriches  in  order  to 
continue  its  kind  to  succeeding  generations. 

Primitive  man,  hen,  knows  the  fruits,  seeds,  and  tubers, 
just  as  the  squirrel,  the  monkey,  and  the  parrot  know 
them,  as  so  much  good  foodstuff,  suitable  to  his  purpose. 
But  why  should  he  ever  dream  of  saving  or  preserving 
some  of  these  fruits  or  seeds,  when  he  has  found  them, 
and  of  burying  them  in  the  soil,  on  the  bare  off-chance 
that  by  pure  magic,  as  it  were,  they  might  give  rise  to 
others  ?    No  idea  could  be  more  foreign  to  the  nature 


■ 


SOLUTION  OF  THE  PROBLEM. 


277 


and  habits  of  early  man.  In  the  first  place,  he  is  far  from 
provident  ;  his  way  is  to  eat  up  at  once  what  he  has  killed 
or  picked  ;  and  in  the  second  place,  how  could  he  ever 
come  to  conceive  that  seeds  buried  in  the  ground  could 
possibly  produce  more  seeds  in  future  ?  Nay,  even  if 
he  did  know  it — which  is  well-nigh  impossible — would  he 
be  likely,  feckless  creature  that  he  is,  to  save  or  spare  a 
handful  of  seeds  to-day  in  order  that  other  seeds  might 
spring  from  their  burial-place  in  another  twelvemonth  ? 
The  difficulty  is  so  enormous  when  one  fairly  faces  it  that 
it  positively  staggers  one  ;  we  begin  to  wonder  whether 
really,  after  all,  the  first  steps  in  cultivation  could  ever 
have  been  taken. 

The  savage,  when  he  has  killed  a  deer  or  a  game-bird, 
does  not  bury  a  part  of  it  or  an  egg  of  it  in  the  ground, 
in  the  expectation  that  it  will  grow  into  more  deer  or 
more  bird  hereafter.  Why,  then,  should  he,  when  he  has 
picked  a  peck  of  fruits  or  wild  cereals,  bury  some  of  them 
in  the  ground,  and  expect  a  harvest  ?  The  savage  is  a 
simple  and  superstitious  person  ;  but  I  do  not  think  he  is 
quite  such  a  fool  as  this  proceeding  would  make  him  out 
to  be.  He  is  not  Hkely  ever  to  have  noticed  that  plants 
in  the  wild  state  grow  from  seeds — at  least  prior  to  the 
rise  of  agriculture,  from  which,  as  I  believe,  he  first  and 
slowly  gained  that  useful  knowledge.  And  he  certainly 
is  not  likely  ever  to  have  tried  deliberate  experiments  upon 
the  properties  of  plants,  as  if  he  were  a  Fellow  of  the  Royal 
Society.  These  two  roads  being  thus  effectually  blocked 
to  us,  we  have  to  enquire,  "  Was  there  ever  any  way  in 
which  primitive  man  could  have  blundered  blindfold  upon 
a  knowledge  of  the  truth,  and  could  have  discovered  in- 
cidentally to  some  other  function  of  his  life  the  two  es- 
sential facts  that  plants  grow  from  seeds,  and  that  the 
growth  and  supply  of  useful  food-plants  can  be  artificially 
increased  by  burying  or  sowing  such  seeds  in  ground 
cleared  of  weeds,  that  is  to  say  of  the  natural  competing 
vegetation  ?  " 


•t! 


■ 

■  1 

V 

iV  f 

! 

■ 
1 

ill  i  ■' 


>n.- 


Mh 


,1     •  ■ 


r    ;i 


278 


COD^  0/7  CULTIVATION. 


I  believe  there  w  one  way,  and  one  way  only,  in  which 
primitive  man  was  at  all  likely  to  become  familiar  with 
these  facts.  I  shall  try  to  show  that  all  the  operations  of 
primitive  agriculture  very  forcibly  point  to  this  strange 
and  almost  magical  origin  of  cultiv^ation  ;  that  all  savage 
agriculture  retains  to  the  last  many  traces  of  its  origin  ; 
and  that  the  sowing  of  the  seed  itself  is  hardly  considered 
so  important  and  essential  a  part  of  the  complex  process 
as  certain  purely  superstitious  and  bloodthirsty  practices 
that  long  accompany  it.  In  one  word,  not  to  keep  the 
reader  in  doubt  any  longer,  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that 
cultivation  and  the  sowing  of  seeds  for  crops  had  their 
beginning  as  an  adjunct  of  the  primitive  burial  system. 

Up  to  the  present  time,  so  far  as  I  know,  only  one  origin 
for  cultivation  has  ever  been  even  conjecturally  suggested ; 
and  that  is  a  hard  one.  It  has  been  said  that  the  first  hint 
of  cultivation  may  have  come  from  the  observation  that 
seeds  accidentally  cast  out  on  the  kitchen-middens,  or  on 
the  cleared  space  about  hutc,  caves,  or  other  human  dwel- 
ling-places, germinated  and  produced  more  seeds  in  suc- 
ceeding seasons.  Very  probably  many  savages  have  ob- 
served the  fact  that  food-plants  frequently  grow  on  such 
heaps  of  refuse.  But  that  observation  alone  does  not 
bring  us  much  nearer  to  the  origin  of  cultivation.  For 
why  should  early  man  connect  such  a  fact  with  the  seeds 
more  than  with  the  bones,  the  shells,  or  the  mere  accident 
of  proximity  ?  We  must  rid  our  minds  of  all  the  precon- 
ceptions of  inductive  and  experimental  science,  and  throw 
ourselves  mentally  back  into  the  position  of  the  savage 
to  whom  nature  is  one  vast  field  of  unrelated  events,  with- 
out fixed  sequence  or  physical  causation.  Moreover,  a 
kitchen-midden  is  not  a  cleared  space  :  on  the  contrary, 
it  is  a  weed-bed  of  extraordinary  luxuriance.  It  brings  us 
no  nearer  the  origin  of  clearing. 

There  is,  however,  one  set  of  functions  !n  which  primi- 
tive men  do  actually  perform  all  the  essential  acts  of  agri- 
culture, without  in  the  least  intending  it  ;  and  that  is  the 


SEEDS  OI'FERED  AT  TUMULI. 


279 


almost  universal  act  of  the  burial  of  the  dead.  Burial  is, 
so  far  as  I  can  see,  the  only  object  for  which  early  races, 
or,  what  comes  to  the  same  thing,  very  low  savages,  ever 
turn  or  dig  the  ground.  We  have  seen  already  that  the 
original  idea  of  burial  was  to  confine  the  ghost  or  corpse 
of  the  dead  man  by  putting  a  weight  of  earth  on  top  of 
him  ;  and  lest  this  should  be  insufficient  to  keep  him  from 
troublesome  reappearances,  a  big  stone  was  frequently 
rolled  above  his  mound  or  tumulus,  which  is  the  origin  of 
all  our  monuments,  now  diverted  to  the  honour  and  com- 
memoration o^  the  deceased.  But  the  pomt  to  which  I 
wish  just  now  to  direct  attention  is  this — that  in  the  act 
of  burial,  and  in  that  act  alone,  we  get  a  first  beginning  of 
turning  the  soil,  exposing  fresh  earth,  and  so  incidentally 
eradicating  the  weeds.  We  have  here,  in  short,  the  first 
necessary  prelude  to  the  evolution  of  agriculture. 

The  next  step,  of  course,  must  be  the  sowing  of  the  seed. 
And  here,  I  venture  to  think,  funeral  customs  supply  us 
with  the  only  conceivable  way  in  which  such  sowing  could 
ever  have  begun.  For  early  men  would  certainly  not 
waste  the  precious  seeds  which  it  took  them  so  much  time 
and  trouble  to  collect  from  the  wild  plants  around  them, 
in  mere  otiose  scientific  experiments  on  vegetable  develop- 
ment. But  we  have  seen  that  it  is  the  custom  of  all 
savages  to  offer  at  the  tombs  of  their  ancestors  food  and 
drink  of  the  same  kind  as  they  themselves  are  in  the  habit 
of  using.  Now,  with  people  in  the  hunting  stage,  such 
oflferings  would  no  doubt  most  frequently  consist  of  meat, 
the  flesh  of  the  hunted  beasts  or  game-birds  ;  but  they 
would  also  include  fish,  fruits,  seeds,  tubers,  and  berries, 
and  in  particular  such  rich  grains  as  those  of  the  native 
pulses  and  cereals.  Evidence  of  such  things  being  offered 
at  the  graves  of  the  dead  has  been  collected  in  such  abun- 
dance by  Dr.  Tylor,  Mr.  Frazer,  and  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer, 
that  I  need  not  here  adduce  any  further  examples  of  so 
familiar  a  practice. 

What  must  be  the  obvious  result  ?     Here,  and  here 


'« , 


■il 


28o 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


KP 


alone,  the  savage  quite  unconsciously  sows  seeds  upon 
newly-turned  ground,  deprived  of  its  weeds,  and  further 
manured  by  the  blood  and  meat  of  the  frequent  sacrificial 
offerings.  These  seeds  must  often  spring  up  and  grow 
apace,  with  a  rapidity  and  luxuriance  which  cannot  fail 
to  strike  the  imagination  of  the  primitive  hunter.  Espe- 
cially will  this  be  the  case  with  that  class  of  plants  which 
ultimately  develop  into  the  food-crops  of  civilised  society. 
For  the  peculiarity  of  these  plants  is  that  they  are  one  and 
all — maize,  com,  or  rice,  pease,  beans,  or  millet — annuals 
of  rapid  growth  and  portentous  stature  ;  plants  which 
have  thriven  in  the  struggle  for  existence  by  laying  up 
large  stores  of  utilisable  material  in  their  seeds  for  the  use 
of  the  seedling  ;  and  this  peculiarity  enables  them  to  start 
in  life  in  each  generation  exceptionally  well  endowed,  and 
so  to  compete  at  an  advantage  with  all  their  fellows. 
Seeds  of  such  a  sort  would  thrive  exceedingly  in  the  newly- 
turned  and  well-manured  soil  of  a  grave  or  barrow  ;  and 
producing  there  a  quantity  of  rich  and  edible  grain,  would 
certainly  attract  the  attention  of  that  practical  and  obser- 
vant man,  the  savage.  For  though  he  is  so  incurious  about 
what  are  non-essentials,  your  savage  is  a  peculiarly  long- 
headed person  about  all  that  concerns  his  own  immediate 
advantage. 

What  conclusion  would  at  once  be  forced  upon  him  ? 
That  seeds  planted  in  freshly-turned  and  richly-manured 
soil  produce  threefold  and  fourfold  ?  Nothing  of  the  sort. 
He  knows  naught  of  seeds  and  manures  and  soils  ;  he 
would  at  once  conclude,  after  his  kind,  that  the  dreaded 
and  powerful  ghost  in  the  barrow,  pleased  with  the  gifts 
of  meat  and  seeds  offered  to  him,  had  repaid  those  gifts 
in  kind  by  returning  grain  for  grain  a  hundredfold  out  of 
his  own  body.  This  original  connexion  of  ideas  seems 
to  me  fully  to  explain  that  curious  identification  of  the 
ghost  or  spirit  with  the  com  or  other  foodstuff  which  Mr. 
Frazer  has  so  wonderfully  and  conclusively  elaborated  in 
The  Golden  Bough. 


!    I 


I 


FOOD  PLANTS  ON  CRAVES. 


281 


Some  little  evidence  is  even  forthcoming  that  vegetation 
actually  does  show  exceptional  luxuriance  on  graves  and 
barrows.  The  Rev.  Alexander  Stewart  of  Ballachulish 
mentions  that  the  milkmaids  in  Lochaber  and  elsewhere 
in  the  Scotch  highlands  used  to  pour  a  little  milk  daily 
from  the  pail  on  the  "  fairy  knowes,"  or  prehistoric  bar- 
rows ;  and  the  consequence  was  that  "  these  fairy  knolls 
were  clothed  with  a  more  beautiful  verdure  than  any  other 
spot  in  the  country."  In  Fiji,  Mr.  Fison  remarks  that 
yam-plants  spring  luxuriantly  from  the  heaps  of  yam  pre- 
sented to  ancestral  spirits  in  the  sacred  stone  enclosure  or 
temenos;  and  two  or  three  recent  correspondents  (since 
this  chapter  was  first  printed  in  a  monthly  review)  have 
obligingly  communicated  to  me  analogous  facts  from 
Madagascar,  Central  Africa,  and  the  Malay  Archipelago. 
It  is  clear  from  their  accounts  that  graves  do  often  give  rise 
to  crops  of  foodstuffs,  accidentally  springing  from  the 
food  laid  upon  them. 

Just  at  first,  under  such  circumstances,  the  savage  would 
no  doubt  be  content  merely  to  pick  and  eat  the  seeds  that 
thus  grew  casually,  as  it  were,  on  the  graves  or  barrows 
of  his  kings  and  kinsfolk.  But  in  process  of  time  it  would 
almost  certainly  come  about  that  the  area  of  cultivation 
would  be  widened  somewhat.  The  first  step  toward 
such  widening,  I  take  it,  would  arise  tiom  the  observation 
that  cereals  and  other  seeds  only  throve  exceptionally 
upon  newly-made  graves,  not  on  graves  in  general.  For 
as  soon  as  the  natural  vegetation  reasserted  itself,  the 
quickening  power  of  the  ghost  would  seem  to  be  used  up. 
Thus  it  might  be  found  well  to  keep  fresh  ghosts  always 
going  for  agricultural  purposes.  Hence  might  gradually 
arise  a  habit  of  making  a  new  grave  annually,  at  the  most 
fa^'ourable  sowing-time,  which  last  would  come  to  be 
recognised  by  half-unconscious  experiment  and  observa- 
tion. And  ti  s  new  grarve,  as  I  shall  show  reason  for 
believi.ig  a  liule  later,  would  be  the  grave,  not  of  a 
person  who  hapj^ned  to  die  then  and  there  accidentally, 


Tl 


II 


'I 


282 


GCDS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


'hm     .  I 


i:* 


I 


'  ■  i 

!  1i   ■    ■' 

1 

but  of  a  deliberate  victim,  slain  in  order  to  provide  a  spirit 
of  vegetation, — an  artificial  god, — and  to  make  the  corn 
grow  with  vigour  and  luxuriance.  Step  by  step,  I  be- 
lieve, it  would  at  length  be  discovered  that  if  only  you  dug 
wide  enough,  the  corn  would  grow  well  around  as  well  as 
iipon  the  actual  grave  of  the  divine  victim.  Thus  slowly 
there  would  develop  the  cultivated  field,  the  wider  clear- 
ing, dug  up  or  laboured  by  hand,  and  finally  the  ploughed 
field,  which  yet  remains  a  grave  in  theory  and  in  all  es- 
sentials. 

I  have  ventured  to  give  this  long  and  apparently  un- 
essential preamble,  because  I  wish  to  make  it  clear  that  the 
manufactured  or  artificial  god  of  the  corn-field  or  other 
cultivated  plot  really  dates  back  to  the  very  origin  of  cul- 
tivation. Without  a  god,  there  would  be  no  corn-field 
at  all  ;  and  the  corn-field,  I  believe,  is  long  conceived 
merely  as  the  embodiment  of  his  vegetative  spirit.  Nay, 
the  tilled  field  is  often  at  our  own  day,  and  even  in  our 
own  country,  a  grave  in  theory. 

It  is  a  mere  commonplace  at  the  present  time  to  say 
that  among  early  men  and  savages  ever}'  act  of  lif  3  has  a 
sacred  significance  ;  aiid.  agriculture  especially  is  every- 
where and  always  invested  with  a  special  sanctity.  To  us, 
it  would  seem  natural  that  the  act  of  sowing  seed  should 
be  regarded  as  purely  practical  and  physiological  ;  that 
the  seed  should  be  looked  upon  merely  as  the  part  of  the 
plant  intended  for  reproduction,  and  that  its  germination 
should  be  accepted  as  a  natural  and  normal  process. 
Savages  and  early  men,  however,  have  no  such  concep- 
tions. To  them  the  whole  thing  is  a  piece  of  natural 
magic  ;  you  sow  seeds,  or,  to  be  more  accurate,  you  bury 
certain  grains  of  foodstuff  in  the  freshly-turned  soil,  with 
certain  magical  rites  and  ceremonies  ;  and  then,  after  the 
lapse  of  a  certain  time,  plants  begin  to  grow  upon  this  soil, 
from  which  you  finally  obtain  a  crop  of  maize  or  wheat  or 
barley.     The  burial  of  the  seeds  or  grains  is  only  one  part 


THE  CORN-FIELD   VICTIM. 


283 


of  the  magical  cycle,  no  more  necessarily  important  for  the 
realisation  of  the  desired  end  than  many  others. 

And  what  are  the  other  magical  acts  necessary  in  order 
that  grain-bearing  plants  may  grow  upon  the  soil  prepared 
for  their  reception  ?  Mr.  Frazer  has  collected  abundant 
evidence  for  answering  that  question,  a  small  part  of  which 
I  shall  recapitulate  here  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  have 
not  read  his  remarkable  work,  referring  students  to  The 
Golden  Bough  itself  for  fuller  details  and  collateral  develop- 
ments. At  the  same  time  I  should  like  to  make  it  clearly 
understood  that  Mr.  Frazer  is  personally  in  no  way  re- 
sponsible for  the  use  I  here  make  of  his  admirable 
materials. 

All  the  world  over,  savages  and  semi-civilised  people 
are  in  the  habit  of  sacrificing  human  victims,  whose  bodies 
are  buried  in  the  field  Vv'ith  the  seed  of  corn  or  other  bread- 
scuffs.  Often  enough  the  victim's  blood  is  mixed  with  the 
grain  in  order  to  fertilise  it.  The  most  famous  instance 
is  that  of  the  Khonds  of  Orissa,  who  chose  special  victims, 
known  as  Meriahs,  and  offered  them  up  to  ensure  good 
harvests.  The  Meriah  was  often  kept  for  years  before 
being  sacrificed.  He  was  regarded  as  a  consecrated  being, 
and  treated  with  extreme  affection,  mingled  with  defer- 
ence. A  Meriah  youth,  on  reaching  manhood,  was  g^ven 
a  wife  who  was  herself  a  Meriah  ;  their  offspring  were  all 
brought  up  as  victims.  "  The  periodical  sacrifices,"  says 
Mr.  Frazer,  "were  generally  so  arranged  by  tribes  and 
divisions  of  tribes  that  each  head  of  a  family  was  enabled, 
at  least  once  a  year,  to  procure  a  shred  of  flesh  for  his 
fields,  generally  about  the  time  when  his  chief  crop  was 
laid  down."  On  the  day  of  the  sacrifice,  which  was  horri- 
ble beyond  description  in  its  details,  the  body  was  cut  to 
pieces,  and  the  flesh  hacked  from  it  was  instantly  taken 
home  by  the  persons  whom  each  village  had  deputed  to 
bring  it.  On  arriving  at  its  destination,  it  was  divided 
by  the  priest  into  two  portions,  one  of  which  he  buried  in 
a  hole  in  the  ground,  with  his  back  turned  and  without 


'"PVi™'«»W»   I'"     ^"V"-'  ''■  ' 


if' ■ 


\i' 


I.      .Ml        . 

■   [  >      1^'   ■ 


r'/ 


f  ■;  '  I 


Hv!!  ^iii 


i  ■  ;■» 


284 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


looking  at  it.  Then  each  man  in  the  village  added  a  I'ttle 
earth  to  cover  it,  and  the  priest  poured  water  over  the 
mimic  tumulus.  The  other  portion  of  the  flesh  the  priest 
divided  into  as  many  shares  as  there  were  heads  of  houses 
present.  Each  head  of  a  house  buried  his  shred  in  his 
own  field,  placing  it  in  the  earth  behind  his  back  without 
looking.  The  other  remains  of  the  human  victim — the 
head,  the  bones,  and  the  intestines — were  burned  on  a 
funeral-pile,  and  the  ashes  were  scattered  over  the  fields, 
or  mixed  with  the  new  corn  to  preserve  it  from  injury. 
Every  one  of  these  details  should  be  carefully  noted. 

Now,  in  this  case,  it  is  quite  clear  to  me  that  every  field 
is  regarded  as  essentially  a  grave  ;  portions  of  the  divine 
victim  are  buried  in  it  ;  his  ashes  are  mixed  with  the  seed  ; 
and  from  the  ground  thus  treated  he  springs  again  in  the 
form  of  corn,  or  rice,  or  turmeric.  These  customs,  as  Mr. 
Frazer  riglitly  notes,  "  imply  that  to  the  body  of  the 
Meriah  there  was  ascribed  a  direct  or  intrinsic  power  c.t 
making  the  crops  to  grow.  In  other  words,  the  flesh  and 
ashes  of  the  victim  were  believed  to  be  endov^ed  with  a 
magical  or  physical  power  of  fertilising  the  land."  More 
than  that,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  seed  itself  is  not  regarded 
as  sufficient  to  produce  a  crop  :  it  is  the  seed  buried  in  the 
sacred  grave  with  the  divine  flesh  which  germinates  at  last 
into  next  year's  foodstuffs. 

A  few  other  points  must  be  noticed  about  this  essential 
case,  which  is  one  of  the  most  typical  instances  of  manu- 
factured godhead.  The  Meriah  was  only  satisfactory  if  he 
had  been  purchased — "  bought  with  a  price,"  like  the 
children  who  were  built  as  foundation-gods  into  walls  ;  or 
else  was  the  child  of  a  previous  Meriah — in  other  words, 
was  of  divine  stock  by  descent  and  inheritance.  Khonds  in 
distress  often  sold  their  children  as  Meriahs,  "considering 
the  beatification  "  (apotheosis,  I  would  rather  say)  "  of 
their  souls  certain,  aiid  their  death,  for  the  benefit  of  man- 
kind, the  most  honourable  possible."  This  sense  of  the 
sacrifice  as  a  case  of  "  one  man  dying  for  the  people  "  is 


MAKING  A  CORN-GOD. 


285 


most  marked  in  our  accounts,  and  is  especially  interesting 
from  its  analogy  to  Christian  reasoning.     A  man  of  the 
Panua  tribe  was  once  known  to  upbraid  a  Khond  because 
he  had  sold  for  a  Meriah  his  daughter  whom  the  Panua 
wished  to  marry  ;  the  Khonds  around  at  once  comforted 
the  insulted  father,  exclaiming,  "  Your  child  died  that  all 
the  world  may  live."     Here  and  elsewhere  we  have  the 
additional  idea  of  a  piacular  value  attached  to  the  sacrifice, 
about  which  more  must  be  said  in  a  subsequent  chapter. 
The  death  of  the  Meriah  was  supposed  to  ensure  not  only 
good  crops,  bat  also  "  immunity  from  all  disease  and  ac- 
cident."    The  Khonds  shouted  in  his  dying  ear,  "  We 
bought  you  with  a  price  ;  no  sin  rests  with  us."     It  is 
also  worthy  of  notice  that  the  victim  was  anointed  with 
oil,  a  point  which  recalls  the  very  name  of  Christus.     Once 
more,  the  victim  might  not  be  bound  or  make  any  show 
of  resistance  ;  but  the  bones  of  his  arms  and  his  legs  were 
often   broken   to   render  struggling  impossible.     Some- 
times, however,  he  was  stupefied  with  opium,  one  of  the 
ordinary  features  in  the  manufacture  of  gods,  as  we  have 
already     seen,     being     such     preliminary     stupefaction. 
Among  the  various  ways  in  which  the  Meriah  was  slain 
I    would    particularly    specify    the    mode    of    execution 
by  squeezing  him  to  death  in  the  cleft  of  a  tree.     I  mention 
these  points  here,  though  they  somewhat  interrupt  the 
general  course  of  our  argument,  because  of  their  great 
importance  as  antecedents  of  the  Christian  theory.     In 
fact,  T  believe  the  Christian  legend  to  have  been  mainly 
constructed  out  of  the  details  of  such  early  god-making 
sacrifices  ;  I  hold  that  Christ  is  essentiallv  one  such  arti- 
ficial  god  ;  and  I  trust  the  reader  will  carefully  observe 
for  himself  as  we  proceed  how  many  small  details  (such 
as  the  breaking  of  the  bones)  recall  in  many  ways  the  inci- 
dents of  the  passion  and  the  crucifixion. 

The  Khonds,  however,  have  somewhat  etherealised  the 
conception  of  artificial  god-malcing  by  allowing  one  victim 
to  do  for  many  fields  together.    Other  savages  are  more 


i.' 


r 


11 


I 


I 


286 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


I 


I 


I   ■'.    ^^1 


' 


, .1  ,  '    1 


i 


I 


prodigal  of  divine  crop-raisers.     To  draw  once  more  from 
Mr.   Frazer's  storehouse — the  Indians  of  Guayaquil,   in 
South  America,  used  to  sacrifice  human  blood  and  the 
hearts  of  men  when  they  sowed  their  fields.     The  ancient 
Mexicans,  conceiving  the  maize  as  a  personal  being  who 
went  through  the  whole  course  of  life  between  seed-time 
and  harvest,  sacrificed  new-born  babes  when  the  maize  was 
sown,  older  children  when  it  had  sprouted,  and  so  on  till 
it  was  fully  ripe,  when  they  sacrificed  old  men.     May  we 
not  parallel  with  this  instance  the  singular  fact  that  the 
Romans  had  as  their  chief  agricultural  deity  Saturnus,  the 
god  of  sowing,  but  had  also  several  other  subsidiary  crop- 
deities,  such  as  Seia,  who  has  to  do  with  the  corn  when 
it  sprouts,  Segetia,  with  the  corn  when  shot  up,  and  Tu- 
tilina  with  the  corn  stored  in  the  granary  ?     (An  obvious 
objection  based  on  the  numerous  gods  of  childhood  and 
practical  arts  at  Rome  will  be  answered  in  a  later  chapter.) 
The  Pawnees,  again,  annually  sacrificed  a  human  victim  in 
spring,  when  they  sowed  their  fields.     They  thought  that 
an  omission  of  this  sacrifice  would  be  followed  by  the  total 
failure  of  the  crops  of  maize,  beans,  and  pumpkins.     In 
the  account  of  one  ciuch  sacrifice  of  a  girl  in  1837  or  1838, 
we  are  told :     "  While  her  ilesh  was  still  warm,  it  was  cut 
in  small  pieces  from  the  bones,  put  in  little  baskets,  and 
taken  to  a  neighbouring  corn-field.     Here  the  head  chief 
took  a  piece  of  the  flesh  from  a  basket,  and  squeezed  a 
drop  of  blood  upon  the  newly-deposited  grains  of  corn. 
His  example  was  followed  by  the  rest,  till  all  the  seed  had 
been  sprinkled  with  the  blood  ;  it  was  then  covered  up 
with  earth."     Many  other  cases  might  be  quoted  from 
America. 

In  West  Africa,  once  more,  a  tribal  queen  used  to  sac- 
rifice a  man  and  woman  in  the  month  of  March.  They 
were  killed  with  spades  and  hoes,  and  their  bodies  buried 
in  the  middle  of  a  field  which  had  just  been  tilled.  At 
Lagos,  in  Guinea,  it  was  the  custom  annually  to  impale 
a  young  girl  alive  soon  after  the  spring  equinox  in  order 


I 


iV 


» ; 


THE  VICTIM  AS  SEED. 


287 


to  secure  good  crops.  A  similar  sacrifice  is  still  annually 
offered  at  Benin.  The  Marimos,  a  Bechuana  tribe,  sacri- 
fice a  human  being  for  the  crops.  The  victim  chosen  is 
generally  a  short  stout  man.  He  is  seized  by  violence  or 
intoxicated  (note  that  detail)  and  taken  to  the  fields, 
where  he  is  killed  amongst  the  wheat  "  to  serve  as  seed." 
After  his  blood  has  coagulated  in  the  sun,  it  is  burned, 
along  with  that  peculiarly  sacred  part,  the  frontal  bone, 
the  flesh  attached  to  it,  and  the  brain  ;  the  ashes  are  then 
scattered  over  the  ground  to  fertilise  it.  Such  scattering 
of  the  ashes  occurs  in  many  instances,  and  will  meet  us 
again  in  the  case  of  Osiris. 

In  India,  once  more,  the  Gonds,  like  the  Khonds,  kid- 
napped Brahman  boys,  and  kept  them  as  victims  to  be 
sacrificed  on  various  occasions.  At  sowing  and  reaping, 
after  a  triumphal  procession,  one  of  the  lads  was  killed  by 
being  punctured  with  a  poisoned  arrow.  His  blood  was 
then  sprinkled  over  the  ploughed  field  or  the  ripe  crop,  and 
his  flesh  was  sacramentally  devoured.  The  last  point 
again  will  call  at  a  later  stage  for  further  examination. 

I  will  detail  no  more  such  instances  (out  of  the  thousands 
that,  exist)  for  fear  of  seeming  tedious.  But  the  interpre- 
tation I  put  upon  the  facts  is  this.  Originally,  men  noticed 
that  food-plants  grew  abundantly  from  the  laboured  and 
well-manured  soil  of  graves.  They  observed  that  this 
richness  sprang  from  a  coincidence  of  three  factois — dig- 
ging, a  sacred  dead  body,  and  seeds  of  foodstuffs.  In 
time,  they  noted  that  if  you  dug  wide  enough  and 
scattered  seed  far  enough,  a  single  corpse  was  capable  of 
fertilising  a  considerable  area.  The  grave  grew  into  the 
field  or  garden.  But  they  still  thought  it  necessary  to 
bury  some  one  in  the  field  ;  and  most  of  the  evidence 
shows  that  they  regarded  this  victim  as  a  divine  person- 
age ;  that  they  considered  him  the  main  source  of  growth 
or  fertility  ;  and  that  they  endeavoured  to  deserve  his 
favour  by  treating  him  well  during  the  greater  part  of  his 
lifetime.     For  in  many  of  the  accounts  it  is  expressly 


288 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


h    : 


Stated  that  the  intended  victim  was  treated  as  a  god  or  as 
a  divine  king,  and  was  suppUed  with  every  sort  of  luxury 
up  to  the  moment  of  his  immolation.  In  process  of  time, 
the  conception  of  the  field  as  differing  from  the  grave  grew 
more  defined,  and  the  large  part  borne  by  seed  in  the  pro- 
cedure was  more  fully  recognised.  Even  so,  however, 
nobody  dreamed  of  sowing  the  seed  alone  without  the 
body  of  a  victim.  Both  grain  and  flesh  or  blood  came  to 
be  regarded  alike  as  "  seed  "  :  that  is  to  say,  the  concur- 
rence of  the  two  was  considered  necessary  to  produce  the 
desired  efif^ct  of  germination  and  fertility.  Till  a  very 
late  period,  either  the  actual  sacrifice  or  some  vague  rem- 
nant of  it  remained  as  an  essential  part  of  cultivation. 
Mr.  Frazer's  pages  teem  with  such  survivals  in  modem 
folk-custom.  From  his  work  and  from  other  sources,  I 
will  give  a  few  instances  of  these  last  dying  relics  of  the 
primitive  superstition. 

Mr.  Gomme,  in  his  Ethnology  in  Folklore,  supplies  an 
account  of  a  singular  village  festival  in  Southern  India. 
In  this  feast,  a  priest,  known  as  the  Potraj,  and  specially 
armed  with  a  divine  whip,  like  the  scourge  of  Osiris, 
sacrifices  a  sacred  buffalo,  which  is  turned  loose  when  a 
calf,  and  allowed  to  feed  and  roam  about  the  village.  In 
that  case,  we  have  the  common  substitution  of  an  animal 
for  a  human  victim,  which  almost  always  accompanies 
advancing  civilisation.  At  the  high  festival,  the  head  of 
the  buflfalo  was  struck  oflf  at  a  single  blow,  and  plac-l  in 
front  of  the  shrine  of  the  village  goddess.  Around  were 
placed  vessels  containing  the  different  cereals,  and  hard  by 
a  heap  of  mixed  grains  with  a  drill-plough  in  the  centre. 
The  carcase  was  then  cut  up  into  small  pieces,  and  each 
cultivator  received  a  portion  to  bury  in  his  field.  The 
heap  of  grain  was  finally  divided  among  all  the  cultivators, 
to  be  buried  by  each  one  in  his  field  with  the  bit  of  flesh. 
At  last,  the  head,  that  very  sacred  part,  was  buried  before 
a  little  temple,  sacred  to  the  goddess  of  boundaries.  The 
goddess  is  represented  by  a  shapeless  stone — no  doubt  a 


i 


1  I 


'^ 


ANIMAL  CORN-GODS. 


289 


Terminus,  or  rather  the  tombstone  of  an  artificial  goddess, 
a  girl  buried  under  an  ancient  boundary-mark.  Here  we 
have  evidently  a  last  stage  of  the  same  ritual  which  in  the 
case  of  the  Khonds  was  performed  with  a  human  victim. 
It  is  worth  while  noting  that,  as  part  of  this  ceremony,  a 
struggle  took  place  for  portions  of  the  victim. 

A  still  more  attenuated  form  of  the  same  ceremony  is 
mentioned  by  Captain  Harkness  and  others,  as  occurring 
among  the  Badagas  of  the  Nilgiri  Hills.  I  condense 
their  accounts,  taking  out  of  each  such  elements  as  are 
most  cognate  to  our  purpose.  Among  these  barbarians, 
the  first  furrow  is  ploughed  by  a  low-caste  Kurrumbar, 
who  gives  his  benediction  to  the  field,  without  which  there 
would  be  no  harvest.  Here,  the  member  of  the  aboriginal 
race  is  clearly  looked  upon  as  a  priest  or  kinsman  of  the 
local  gods,  whose  cooperation  must  be  obtained  by  later 
intrusive  races.  But  the  Kurrumbar  does  not  merely  bless 
the  field  ;  he  also  sets  up  a  stone  in  its  midst  ;  and  then, 
prostrating  himself  before  the  stone,  he  sacrifices  a  goat, 
the  head  of  which  he  keeps  as  his  perquisite.  This  pecu- 
liar value  of  the  oracular  head  retained  by  the  priest  is  also 
significant.  When  harvest-time  comes,  the  came  Kur- 
rumbar is  summoned  once  more,  in  order  that  he  may 
reap  the  first  handful  of  corn,  an  episode  the  full  impor- 
tance of  which  will  only  be  apparent  to  those  who  have 
read  Mr.  Frazer's  analysis  of  harvest  customs.  But  in 
this  case  also,  the  appearance  of  the  sacred  stone  is  preg- 
nant with  meaning.  We  can  hardly  resist  the  inference 
that  we  have  here  to  do  with  the  animal  substitute  for  a 
human  sacrifice  of  the  god-making  order,  in  which  the 
victim  was  slaughtered,  a  stone  set  up  to  mark  the  site 
of  the  sacrifice,  and  the  head  preserved  as  a  god  to  give 
oracles,  in  the  fashion  with  which  we  are  already  familiar. 
Comparing  this  instance  with  the  previous  one  of  the 
sacred  buflfalo  and  the  still  earlier  cases  of  ancestral  heads 
preserved  as  gods  for  oracular  purposes,  I  think  the  affili- 
ation is  too  clear  to  be  disregarded. 


290 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


|| 


■'a!     \ 


I    ' 


Lki;      4- 


■    ■  H      ;jl 


Evidence  of  similar  customs  elsewhere  exists  in  such 
abundance  that  I  can  only  give  a  very  small  part  of  it 
at  present,  lest  I  should  assign  too  much  space  to  a  subor- 
dinate question  ;  I  hope  to  detail  the  whole  of  it  hereafter 
in  a  subsequent  volume.  Here  is  a  striking  example  from 
Mr.  Gomme's  Ethnology  in  Folklore,  the  analogy  of  which 
with  preceding  instances  will  at  once  be  apparent. 

"  At  the  village  of  Holne,  situated  on  one  of  the  spurs 
of  Dartmoor,  is  a  field  of  about  two  acres,  the  property  of 
the  parish,  and  called  the  Ploy  Field.  In  the  centre  of 
this  field  stands  a  granite  pillar  (Menhir)  six  or  seven  feet 
high.  On  ]May-morning,  before  daybreak,  the  young  men 
of  the  village  used  to  assemble  there,  and  then  proceed 
to  the  moor,  where  they  selected  a  ram  lamb,  and,  after 
running  it  down,  brought  it  in  triumph  to  the  Ploy  Field, 
fastened  it  to  the  pillar,  cut  its  throat,  and  then  roasted  it 
whole,  skin,  wool,  etc.  At  midday  a  struggle  took  place, 
at  the  risk  of  cut  hands,  for  a  slice,  it  being  supposed  to 
confer  luck  for  the  ensuing  year  on  the  fortunate  devourer. 
As  an  act  of  gallantry  the  young  men  sometimes  fought 
their  way  through  the  crowd  to  get  a  slice  for  the  chosen 
amongst  the  young  women,  all  of  whom,  in  their  best 
dresses,  attended  the  Ram  Feast,  as  it  was  called.  Dan- 
cing, wrestling,  and  other  games,  assisted  by  copious 
libations  of  cider  during  the  afternoon,  prolonged  the  fes- 
tivity till  midnight." 

Here  again  we  get  several  interesting  features  of  the 
primitive  ritual  preserved  for  us.  The  connexion  with 
the  stone  which  enshrines  the  original  village  deity  is  per- 
fectly clear.  This  stone  no  doubt  represents  the  place 
where  the  local  foundation-god  was  slain  in  very  remote 
ages  ;  and  it  is  therefore  the  proper  place  for  the  annual 
renewal  sacrifices  to  be  offered.  The  selection  of  May- 
morning  for  the  rite  ;  the  slaughter  at  the  stone  pillar  ; 
the  roasting  of  the  beast  whole  ;  the  struggle  for  the 
pieces  ;  and  the  idea  that  they  would  confer  luck,  all  show 
survival  of  primitive  feeling.     So  does  the  cider,  sacra- 


iH 


' 


THE  CORN-GOD  IN  ENGLAND. 


291 


mental  intoxication  being  an  integral  part  of  all  these  pro- 
ceedings. Every  detail,  indeed,  has  its  meaning  for  those 
who  look  close  ;  for  the  struggle  at  midday  is  itself  signi- 
ficant, as  is  also  the  prolongation  of  the  feast  till  midnight. 
But  we  miss  the  burial  of  the  pieces  in  the  fields  ;  in  so  far, 
the  primitive  object  of  the  rite  seems  to  have  been  for- 
gotten or  overlooked  in  Devonshire. 

A  still   more   attenuated   survival   is   quoted   by   Mr. 
Gomme  from  another  English  village.     "  A  Whitsuntide 
custom  in  the  parish  of  King':  Teignton,  Devonshire,  is 
thus  described  :  A  lamb  is  drawn  about  the  parish  on 
Whitsun  Monday  in  a  cart  covered  with  garlands  of  lilac, 
laburnum,  and  other  flowers,  when  persons  are  requested 
to   give   something  towards   the   animal   and   attendant 
expenses  ;    on  Tuesday  it  is  killed  and  roasted   whole 
in  the  middle  of  the  village.     The  lamb  is  then  sold  ini 
slices  to  the  poor  at  a  cheap  rate.     The  origin  of  the  cus- 
tom is  forgotten,  but  a  tradition,  supposed  to  trace  back 
*o  heathen  days,  is  to  this  effect  :  The  village  suffered^ 
from  a  dearth  of  water,  when  the  inhabitants  were  advised 
by  their  priests  to  pray  to  the  gods  for  water  ;  whereupon: 
the  water  sprang  up  spontaneously  in  a  meadow  about  a: 
third  of  a  mile  above  the  river,  in  an  estate  now  called 
Rydon,  amply  sufficient  to  supply  the  wants  of  the  place, 
and  at  present  adequate,  even  in  a  dry  summer,  to  work 
three  mills.     A  lamb,  it  is  said,  has  ever  since  that  time 
been  sacrificed  as  a  votive  thank-offering  at  Whitsuntide  in 
the  manner  before  mentioned.     The  said  water  appears 
like  a  large  pond,  from  which  in  rainy  weather  may  be 
seen  jets  springing  up  some  inches  above  the  surface  in 
many  parts.     It  has  ever  had  the  name  of  *  Fair  Water.'  " 

I  mention  this  curious  instance  here,  because  it  welJ 
illustrates  the  elusive  way  in  which  such  divine  customs  of 
various  origins  merge  into  one  another  ;  and  also  the 
manner  in  which  different  ideas  are  attached  in  different 
places  to  very  similar  ceremonies.  For  Mr.  Frazer  has^ 
shown  that  the  notion  of  a  rain-charm  is  also  closely  bound 


•m 


I  I 


j-i|;ii-. 


I   '  [■■ 


;iil:    ! 


292 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


Up  with  the  gods  of  agriculture  ;  the  Khond  Meriah  must 
weep,  or  there  will  be  no  rain  that  year  ;  his  red  blood 
must  flow,  or  the  turmeric  will  not  produce  its  proper  red 
colour.  (Compare  the  red  blood  that  flowed  from  Poly- 
dorus's  cornel,  and  the  Indian's  blood  that  drops  from  the 
Canadian  bloodroot.)  In  this  last  instance  of  the  King's 
Teignton  ceremony,  i;  is  the  rain-charm  that  has  most 
clearly  survived  to  our  days  :  and  there  are  obvious  refe- 
rences to  a  human  sacrifice  offered  up  to  make  a  river-god 
in  times  long  gone,  and  now  replaced  by  an  animal  victim. 
The  garlands  of  lilac,  laburnum,  and  other  flowers  are, 
however,  common  adornments  of  the  artificial  god  of  cul- 
tivation ;  they  occurred  in  the  Dionysiac  rites  and  the 
Attis  festival,  and  are  still  preserved  in  many  European 
customs. 

Very  closely  bound  up  with  the  artificial  gods  of  culti- 
vation are  the  terminal  gods  with  whom  I  dealt  in  the  last 
chapter  ;  so  closely  that  it  is  sometimes  impossible  to 
separate  them.  We  have  already  seen  some  instances  of 
this  connexion  ;  the  procession  of  the  sacred  victim 
usually  ends  with  a  perlustration  of  the  boundaries.  This 
perlustration  is  often  preceded  by  the  head  of  the  thean- 
thropic  victim.  Such  a  ceremony  extends  all  over  India  ; 
in  France  and  other  European  countries  it  survives  in 
the  shape  of  the  rite  known  as  Blessing  the  Fields,  where 
the  priest  plays  the  same  part  as  is  played  among  the 
Nilgiri  hillsmen  by  the  low-caste  Kurrumbar.  In  this  rite, 
the  Host  is  carried  round  the  bounds  of  the  parish,  as  the 
head  of  the  sacred  buffalo  is  carried  round  at  the  Indian 
festival.  In  some  cases  every  field  is  separately  visited. 
I  was  told  as  a  boy  in  Normandy  that  a  portion  of  the  Host 
(stolen  or  concealed,  I  imagine)  was  sometimes  buried 
in  each  field,  but  of  this  curious  detail  I  can  now  obtain 
no  confirmatory  evidence,  and  I  do  not  insist  upon  it. 
We  must  remember,  however,  that  the  Host  is  the  body  of 
Christ,  and  that  its  presence  in  such  cases  is  the  exact 
analogue  of  the  carrying  round  the  pieces  of  the  Meriah. 


J  i, 


MITIGATED  FORMS  OF  GOD-MAKING. 


293 


In  England,  the  ceremony  merges  into  that  of  Beating  the 
Bounds,  already  described  ;  though  I  believe  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  boy-victims,  and  the  necessity  for  whipping 
them  as  a  rain-charm,  will  now  be  more  apparent  than 
when  we  last  met  with  it. 

In  many  cases,  all  the  world  over,  various  animals  come 
to  replace  the  human  victim-god.  Thus  we  learn  from 
Festus  that  the  Romans  sacrificed  red-haired  puppies  in 
spring,  in  the  belief  that  the  crops  would  thus  grow  ripe 
and  ruddy  ;  and  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  these  pup- 
pies, like  the  lamb  sacrifice  at  Holne  and  King's  Teignton, 
were  a  substitute  for  an  original  human  victim.  Even  so, 
the  Egyptians,  .is  we  shall  see,  sacrificed  red-haired  men 
as  the  representatives  of  Osiris,  envisaged  as  a  corn-god. 
In  some  cases,  indeed,  we  have  historical  evidence  of  the 
human  god  being  replaced  at  recent  dates  by  a  divine 
animal-victim  ;  for  example,  in  Chinna  Kimedy,  after  the 
British  had  suppressed  human  sacrifices,  a  goat  took  the 
place  of  the  sacred  Meriah. 

Mannhardt  has  collected  much  evidence  of  the  curious 
customs  still  (or  lately)  existing  in  modern  Europe,  which 
look  like  survivals  in  a  very  mitigated  form  of  the  same 
superstition.  These  are  generally  known  by  the  name 
of  "  Carrying  out  Death,"  or  "  Burying  the  Carnival." 
They  are  practised  in  almost  every  country  of  Europe, 
and  relics  of  them  survive  even  in  England.  The  essence 
of  these  ceremonies  consists  in  an  effigy  being  substituted 
for  the  human  victim.  This  effigy  is  treated  much  as  the 
victim  used  to  be.  Sometimes  it  is  burned,  sometimes 
thrown  into  a  river,  and  sometimes  buried  piecemeal.  In 
Austrian  Silesia,  for  example,  the  effigy  is  burned,  and 
while  it  is  burning  a  general  struggle  takes  place  for  the 
pieces,  which  are  pulled  out  of  the  flames  with  bare  hands. 
(Compare  the  struggle  among  the  Khonds,  and  also  at 
the  Potraj  festival  and  the  Holne  sacrifice.)  Each  person 
who  secures  a  fragment  of  the  figure  ties  it  to  a  branch 
of  the  largest  tree  in  his  garden,  or  buries  it  in  his  field,  in 


.  .  I 


//■'  k 


294 


CODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


1/     j-  ■'»'/!»"•  I 


' 


the  belief  that  this  causes  the  crops  to  grow  better.  Some- 
times a  sheaf  of  corn  does  duty  for  the  victim,  and  por- 
tions of  it  are  buried  in  each  field  as  fertilisers.  In  the 
Hartz  Mountains,  at  similar  ceremonies,  a  living  man  is 
laid  on  a  baking-trough  and  carried  with  dirges  to  a 
grave  ;  but  a  glass  of  brandy  is  substituted  for  him  at  the 
last  moment.  Here  the  spirit  is  the  equivalent  of  a  god. 
In  other  cases  the  man  is  actually  covered  with  straw,  and 
so  lightly  buried.  In  Italy  and  Spain,  a  similar  custom 
bore  the  name  of  "  Sawing  the  Old  Woman."  In  Pa- 
lermo, a  real  old  woman  was  drav;n  through  the  streets 
on  a  cart,  and  made  to  mount  a  sca^old,  where  two  mock 
executioners  proceeded  to  saw  through  a  bladder  of  blood 
which  had  been  fitted  to  her  neck.  The  blood  gushed  out, 
and  the  old  woman  pretended  to  swoon  and  die.  This  is 
obviously  a  mitigation  of  a  human  sacrifice.  At  Florence, 
an  effigy  stuffed  with  walnuts  and  dried  figs  represented 
the  Old  Woman.  At  mid-Lent,  this  figure  was  sawn 
through  the  middle  in  the  Mercato  Nuovo,  and  when  the 
dried  fruits  tumbled  out  they  were  scrambled  for  by  the 
crowd,  as  savages  scrambled  for  fragments  of  the  human 
victim  or  his  animal  representative.  Upon  all  this  subject 
a  mass  of  material  has  been  collected  by  Mannhardt  and 
Mr.  Frazer.  Perhaps  the  most  interesting  case  of  all  is  the 
Russian  ceremony  of  the  Funeral  of  Yarilo.  In  this  in- 
stance, the  people  chose  an  old  man  and  gave  him  a  small 
cofBn  containing  a  figure  representing  Yarilo.  This  he 
carried  out  of  the  town,  followed  by  women  chanting 
dirges,  as  the  Syrian  women  mourned  for  Adonis,  and  the 
Egyptians  for  Osiris.  In  the  open  fields  a  grave  was  dug, 
and  into  it  the  figure  was  lowered  amid  weeping  and  wail- 
ing. 

Mjrth  and  folk-lore  also  retain  many  traces  of  the  primi- 
tive connexion.  Thus,  in  the  genuine  American  legend 
of  Hiawatha,  the  hero  wrestles  with  and  vanquishes  Mon- 
damin,  and  where  he  buries  him  springs  up  for  the  first 
time  the  maize,  or  Indian-corn  plant.     Similar  episodes 


MOCK-MAYORS  AS  CORN  GODS. 


295 


occur  in  the  Finnish  Kalevala  and  other  barbaric  epics. 
According  to  Mr.  Chalmers,  the  Motu  tribe  in  New  Guinea 
say  that  yams  sprang  first  from  the  bones  of  a  murdered 
man,  which  were  buried  in  a  grave.  After  some  time,  the 
grave  was  opened,  and  the  bones  were  found  to  be  no 
longer  bones,  but  large  and  small  yams  of  different  colours. 
In  order  to  complete  our  preliminary  survey  of  these 
artificial  gods  of  cultivation,  before  we  proceed  to  the  con- 
sideration of  the  great  corn-gods  and  wine-gods,  it  may  be 
well  to  premise  that  in  theory  at  least  the  original  victim 
seems  to  have  been  a  king  or  chief,  himself  divine,  or  else 
at  least  a  king's  son  or  daughter,  one  of  the  divine  stock, 
in  whose  veins  flowed  the  blood  of  the  earlier  deities. 
Later  on,  it  would  seem,  the  temporary  king  was  often 
allowed  to  do  duty  for  the  real  king  ;  and  for  this  purpose 
he  seems  frequently  to  have  been  clad  in  royal  robes,  and 
treated  with  divine  and  royal  honours.  Examples  of  this 
complication  will  crop  up  in  the  sequel.  For  the  present 
I  will  only  refer  to  the  interesting  set  of  survivals,  collected 
by  Mr.  Gomme,  where  temporary  kings  or  mayors  in 
England  are  annually  elected,  apparently  for  the  sake  of 
being  sacrificed  only.  In  many  of  these  cases  we  get  mere 
fragmentary  portions  of  the  original  rite  ;  but  by  piecing 
them  all  together,  we  obtain  on  the  whole  a  tolerably 
complete  picture  of  the  original  ceremonial  observance. 
At  St.  Germans  in  Cornwall,  the  mock  mayor  was  chosen 
under  the  large  walnut-tree  at  the  May-fair  ;  he  was  made 
drunk  overnight,  in  order  to  fit  him  for  office,  and  was 
in  that  state  drawn  round  the  nut-tree,  much  as  we  saw 
the  mayor  of  Bovey  rode  round  the  Bovey  stone  on  his 
accession  to  the  mayoralty.  The  mayor  of  St.  Germans 
also  displayed  his  royal  character  by  being  mounted  on 
the  wain  or  cart  of  old  Teutonic  and  Celtic  sovereignty. 
At  Lostwithiel,  the  mock  mayor  was  dressed  with  a  crown 
on  his  head,  and  a  sceptre  in  his  hand,  and  had  a  sword 
borne  before  him.  At  Penrhyn,  the  mayor  was  preceded 
by  torch-bearers  and  town  sergeants,  and  though  he  was 


iH 


296 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


( 


■I  ! 


^1 


not  actually  burnt,  either  in  play  or  in  effigy,  bonfires  were 
lighted,  and  fireworks  discharged,  which  connect  the  cere- 
mony with  such  pyre-sacrifices  of  cremationists  as  the  fes- 
tival of  the  Tyrian  Melcarth  and  the  Baal  of  Tarsus.  On 
Halgaver  Moor,  near  Bodmin,  a  stranger  was  arrested, 
solemnly  tried  in  sport,  and  then  trailed  in  the  mire  or 
otherwise  ill-treated.  At  Polperro,  the  mayor  was  gen- 
rally  *'  some  half-witted  or  drunken  fellow,"  in  either  case, 
according  to  early  ideas,  divine  ;  he  was  treated  with  ale, 
and,  "  having  completed  the  perambulation  of  the  town," 
was  wheeled  by  his  attendants  into  the  sea.  There,  he 
was  allowed  to  scramble  out  again,  as  the  mock  victim 
does  in  many  European  ceremonies  ;  but  originally,  I  do 
not  doubt,  he  was  drowned  as  a  rain-charm. 

These  ceremonies,  at  the  time  when  our  authorities 
learnt  of  them,  had  all  degenerated  to  the  level  of  mere 
childish  pastimes  ;  but  they  contain  in  them,  none  the  less, 
persistent  elements  of  most  tragic  significance,  and  they 
point  back  to  hideous  and  sanguinary  god-making  festi- 
vals. In  most  of  them  we  see  still  preserved  the  choice 
of  the  willing  or  unconscious  victim  ;  the  preference  for 
a  stranger,  a  fool,  or  an  idiot  ;  the  habit  of  intoxicating 
the  chosen  person  ;  the  treatment  of  the  victim  as  king, 
mayor,  or  governor  ;  his  scourging  or  mocking  ;  his  final 
death  ;  and  his  burning  on  a  pyre,  or  his  drowning  as  a 
rain-charm.  All  these  points  are  still  more  clearly  notice- 
able in  the  other  form  of  survival  where  the  king  or  divine 
victim  is  represented,  not  by  a  mock  or  temporary  king, 
but  by  an  image  or  effigy.  Such  is  the  common  case  of 
King  Carnival,  who  is  at  last  burnt  in  all  his  regalia,  or 
thrown  into  a  river.  Our  own  Guy  Fawkes,  though 
fastened  upon  the  personality  of  a  particular  unpopular 
historical  character,  seems  to  be  the  last  feeble  English 
representative  of  such  a  human  victim.  I  will  not  elabo- 
rate this  point  any  further  (considerations  of  space  forbid), 
but  will  refer  the  reader  for  additional  examples  to  Mr. 


-. 


\ 


:ii.:l. 


GRADUAL  STAGES  OF  SUBSTITUTION. 


297 


Gomme's  Village  Community,  and  Mr.  Frazer's  wonderful 
collection  of  examples  in  The  Golden  Bough. 

The  general  conclusion  I  would  incline  to  draw  from  all 
these  instances  is  briefly  this.  Cultivation  probably  began 
with  the  accidental  sowingr  of  grains  upon  the  tumuli  of 
the  dead.  Gradually  it  was  found  that  by  extending  the 
dug  or  tilled  area  and  sowing  it  all  over,  a  crop  would 
grow  upon  it,  provided  always  a  corpse  was  buried  in  the 
centre.  In  process  of  time  divine  corpses  were  annually 
provided  for  the  purpose,  and  buried  with  great  ceremony 
in  each  field.  By-and-bye  it  was  found  sufficient  to  ofifer 
up  a  single  victim  for  a  whole  tribe  or  village,  and  to  di- 
vide his  body  piecemeal  among  the  fields  of  the  commu- 
nity. But  the  crops  that  grew  in  such  fields  were  still 
regarded  as  the  direct  gifts  of  the  dead  and  deified  victims, 
whose  soul  was  supposed  to  animate  and  fertilize  them. 
As  cutivation  spread,  men  became  familiarised  at  last  with 
the  conception  of  the  seed  and  the  ploughing  as  the  really 
essential  elements  in  the  process  ;  but  they  still  continued 
to  attach  to  the  victim  a  religious  importance,  and  to  be- 
lieve in  the  necessity  of  his  presence  for  good  luck  in  the 
harvest.  With  the  gradual  mitigation  of  savagery  an  ani- 
mal sacrifice  was  often  substituted  for  a  human  one  ;  but 
the  fragments  of  the  animal  were  still  distributed  through 
the  fields  with  a  mimic  or  symbolical  burial,  just  as  the 
fragments  of  the  man-god  had  formerly  been  distributed. 
Finally,  under  the  influence  of  Christianity  and  other  civi- 
lised religions,  an  effigy  was  substituted  for  a  human  victim, 
though  an  animal  sacrifice  was  often  retained  side  by  side 
with  it,  and  a  real  human  being  was  playfully  killed  in 
pantomime. 

In  early  stages,  however,  I  note  that  the  field  or  garden 
sometimes  retains  the  form  of  a  tumulus.  Thus  Mr.  Tur- 
ner, the  Samoan  missionary,  writes  of  the  people  of  Tana, 
in  the  New  Hebrides  : 

"  They  bestow  a  great  deal  of  labour  on  their  yam  plan- 
tations, and  keep  them  in  fine  order.    You  look  over  a 


■I  i 


n 


-I 


h  i': 


298 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


■■}] 


reed  fence,  and  there  you  see  ten  or  twenty  mounds  of 
earth,  some  of  them  seven  feet  high  and  sixty  in  circum- 
ference. These  are  heaps  of  loose  earth  without  a  single 
stone,  all  thrown  up  by  the  hand.  In  the  centre  they 
plant  one  of  the  largest  yams  whole,  and  round  the  sides 
some  smaller  ones." 

This  looks  very  much  like  a  tumulus  in  its  temenos.  I 
sould  greatly  like  to  know  whether  a  victim  is  buried  in  it. 

I  may  add  that  the  idea  of  the  crop  being  a  gift  from  the 
deified  ancestor  or  the  divine-human  victim  is  kept  up  in 
the  common  habit  of  offering  the  iirst-fruits  to  the  dead, 
or  to  the  gods,  or  to  the  living  chief,  their  representative 
and  descendant.  Of  the  equivalence  of  these  three  cere- 
monies, I  have  given  some  evidence  in  my  essay  on  Tree- 
Worship  appended  to  my  translation  of  the  Attis  of  Catul- 
lus. For  example,  Mr.  Turner  says  of  these  same  Tanese 
in  the  New  Hebrides  : 

"  The  spirits  of  their  departed  ancestors  were  among 
their  gods.  Chiefs  who  reached  an  advanced  age  were, 
after  death,  deified,  addressed  by  name,  and  prayed  to  on 
various  occasions.  They  were  supposed  especially  to  pre- 
side over  the  growth  of  the  yams  and  the  different  fruit- 
trees.  The  first-fruits  were  presented  to  them,  and  in  do- 
ing this  they  laid  a  Httle  of  the  fruit  on  some  stone  or  shel- 
ving branch  of  the  tree,  or  some  more  temporary  altar 
.  .  .  in  the  form  of  a  table,  .  .  .  All  being 
quiet,  the  chief  acted  as  high  priest  and  prayed  aloud 
thus  :  *  Compassionate  father,  here  is  some  food  for  you  ; 
eat  it  ;  be  kind  to  us  on  account  of  it.'  And  instead  of  an 
Amen,  all  united  in  a  loud  shout." 

Similar  evidence  is  abundant  elsewhere.  I  summarise  a 
little  of  ft.  Every  year  the  Kochs  of  Assam,  when  they 
gather  their  first-fruits,  oflfer  some  to  their  ancestors, 
calling  them  even  by  name,  and  clapping  their  hands  to 
summon  them.  The  people  of  Kobi  and  Sariputi,  two 
villages  in  Ceram,  "  offer  the  first-fruits  of  the  paddy  in 
the  form  of  cooked  rice  to  their  ancestors  as  a  token  of 


M 


THE  FEAST  OF  FIRST-FRUITS. 


299 


tn 


in 
of 


gratitude."  The  ceremony  is  called  "  Feeding  the  Dead." 
In  the  Tenimber  and  Timorlaut  Islands,  the  first-fruits  of 
the  paddy  are  offered  to  the  spirits  of  the  ancestors,  who 
are  worshipped  as  guardian  gods  or  household  lares.  The 
people  of  Luzon  worship  chiefly  the  souls  of  their  ances- 
tors, and  offer  to  them  the  first-fruits  of  the  harvest.  In 
Fiji  the  earliest  of  the  yams  are  presented  to  the  ancestral 
ghosts  in  the  sacred  stone  enclosure  ;  and  no  man  may 
taste  of  the  new  crop  till  after  this  presentation. 

In  other  cases  it  is  gods  rather  than  ghosts  to  whom 
the  offering  is  made,  though  among  savages  the  distinction 
is  for  the  most  part  an  elusive  one.  But  in  not  a  few 
instances  the  first-fruits  are  offered,  not  to  spirits  or  gods 
at  all,  but  to  the  divine  king  himself,  who  is  the  living 
representative  and  earthly  counterpart  of  his  deified  an- 
cestors. Thus  in  Ashantee  a  harvest  festival  is  held  in 
September,  when  the  yams  are  ripe.  During  the  festival 
the  king  eats  the  new  yams,  but  none  of  the  people  may  eat 
them  till  the  close  of  the  festival,  which  lasts  a  fortnight. 
The  Hovas,  of  Madagascar,  present  the  first  sheaves  of  the 
new  grain  to  the  sovereign.  The  sheaves  are  carried  in 
procession  to  the  palace  from  time  to  time  as  the  grain 
ripens.  So,  in  Burmah,  when  the  pangati  fruits  ripen, 
some  of  them  used  to  be  taken  to  the  king's  palace  that 
he  might  eat  of  them  ;  no  one  might  partake  of  them  be- 
fore the  king.  In  short,  what  is  offered  in  one  place  to  the 
living  chief  is  offered  in  another  place  to  his  dead  prede- 
cessor, and  is  offered  in  a  third  place  to  the  great  deity 
who  has  grown  slowly  out  of  them.  The  god  is  the  dead 
king  ;  the  king,  as  in  ancient  Egypt,  is  the  living  god, 
and  the  descendant  of  gods,  his  deified  ancestors.  Indeed, 
the  first-fruits  seem  sometimes  to  be  offered  to  the  human 
victim  himself,  in  his  deified  capacity,  and  sometimes  to 
the  Adonis,  or  Osiris,  who  is  his  crystallised  embodiment. 
Our  own  harvest  festival  seems  to  preserve  the  offering  in 
a  Christianised  form. 

Finally,  I  will  add  that  in  many  cases  it  looks  as  though 


•  I 


I 


300 


GODS  OF  CULTIVATION. 


the  divine  agriculture-victim  were  regarded  as  the  king  in 
person,  the  embodiment  of  the  village  or  tribal  god,  and 
were  offered  up,  himself  to  himself,  at  the  stone  which 
forms  the  monument  and  altar  of  the  primitive  deity.  Of 
this  idea  we  shall  see  examples  when  we  go  on  to  examine 
the  great  corn-gods  and  wine-gods  of  the  Mediterranean 
region. 


/I :  I'  1- 


ORGIASTIC  GOD-MAKING  CEREMONIES. 


301 


CHAPTER  XIV. 


CORN-   AND   WINE-GODS. 


■4 


In  advanced  communities,  the  agricultural  gods  with 
whom  we  dealt  in  the  last  chapter  come  to  acquire  specific 
class-names,  such  as  Attis  and  Adonis  ;  are  specialised  as 
corn-gods,  wine-gods,  gods  of  the  date-palm,  or  gods  of 
the  harvest  ;  and  rise  to  great  distinction  in  the  various 
religions. 

I  propose  to  examine  at  some  length  the  more  impor- 
tant of  these  in  the  Mediterranean  civilisations,  where 
Christianity  was  first  evolved.  And  I  begin  with  Diony- 
sus. 

One  of  the  notable  features  of  the  Potraj  festival  of 
southern  India,  which  Sir  Walter  Elliot  has  minutely  de- 
scribed for  us,  and  of  which  I  gave  a  brief  abstract  in  the 
previous  chapter,  is  its  orgiastic  character.  As  type  of  the 
orgiastic  god-making  ceremonies,  with  their  five-day  fes- 
tival, it  well  deserves  some  fuller  description.  The  feast 
takes  place  near  the  temple  of  the  village  goddess,  who  is 
worshipped  in  the  form  of  an  unshapely  stone,  stained  red 
with  Vermillion,  the  probable  representative  of  the  first  hu- 
man foundation-victim.  An  altar  was  erected  behind  this 
temple  to  the  god  who  bears  the  name  of  Potraj.  He  is 
a  deity  of  cultivation.  The  festival  itself  was  under  the 
charge  of  the  Pariahs,  or  aboriginal  outcasts  ;  it  was  at- 
tended by  all  the  lowest  classes,  including  the  dancing 
girls  of  the  temple  and  the  shepherds  or  other  "  non- 
Aryan  "  castes.  During  the  festival,  these  people  took 
temporarily  the  first  place  in  the  village  ;  they  appeared 


] 


1 


1 


|l: 


■il 


B!  •  f: 


302 


CORN-  AND  JVINE-GODS. 


to  form  the  court  of  the  temporary  king,  and  to  represent 
the  early  local  worship,  whose  gods  the  conquering  races 
are  afraid  of  offending.  For  since  the  dead  of  the  con- 
quered race  are  in  possession  of  the  soil,  immigrant  con- 
querors everywhere  have  a  superstitious  dread  of  incurring 
their  displeasure.  On  the  first  day  of  the  orgy,  the  low- 
caste  people  chose  one  of  themselves  as  priest  or  Potraj. 

On  the  second  day  of  the  feast,  the  sacred  buffalo,  al- 
ready described  as  having  the  character  of  a  theanthro- 
pic  victim,  was  thrown  down  before  the  goddess  ;  its  head 
was  struck  oflf  at  a  single  blow,  and  was  placed  in  front 
of  the  shrine,  with  one  leg  in  its  mouth.  The  carcase,  as 
we  saw  already,  was  then  cut  up,  and  delivered  to  the  cul- 
tivators to  bury  in  their  fields.  The  blood  and  oflfal  were 
afterwards  collected  into  a  large  basket  ;  and  the  officia- 
ting priest,  a  low-caste  man,  who  bore  (like  the  god)  the 
name  of  Potraj,  taking  a  live  kid,  hewed  it  in  pieces  over 
the  mess.  The  basket  was  then  placed  on  the  head  of  a 
naked  man,  of  the  leather-dresser  class,  who  ran  with  it 
round  the  circuit  of  the  village  boundaries,  scattering  the 
fragments  right  and  left  as  he  went.  The  Potraj  was 
armed  with  a  sacred  whip,  like  Osiris  ;  and  this  whip  was 
itself  the  object  of  profound  veneration. 

On  the  third  and  fourth  days,  many  buffaloes  and  sheep 
were  slaughtered  ;  and  on  the  fourth  day,  women  walked 
naked  to  the  temple,  clad  in  boughs  of  trees  alone  ;  a  com- 
mon religious  exercise  of  which  I  have  only  space  here  to 
suggest  that  St.  Elizabeth  of  Hungary  and  the  Godiva  pro- 
cession at  Coventry  are  surviving  relics.  (These  relations 
have  well  been  elucidated  by  Mr.  Sidney  Hartland.) 

On  the  fifth  and  last  day,  the  whole  community  marched 
with  music  to  the  village  temple,  and  offered  a  concluding 
sacrifice  at  the  Potraj  altar.  A  lamb  was  concealed  close 
by.  The  Potraj,  having  found  it  after  a  pretended  search, 
rendered  it  insensible  by  a  blow  of  his  whip,  or  by  mes- 
meric passes — a  survival  of  the  idea  of  the  voluntary 
victim.     Then  the  assistants  tied  the  Potraj's  hands  behind 


THE  CORN-GOD  FESTIVAL. 


303 


sheep 
liked 
icotn- 
Ire  to 
pro- 
Itions 

rched 
|ding 
Iclose 
irch, 
Imes- 
itary 
ihind 


his  back,  and  the  whole  party  began  to  dance  round  him 
with  orgiastic  joy.  Potraj  joined  in  the  excitement,  and 
soon  came  under  the  present  influence  of  the  deity.  He 
was  led  up,  bound,  to  the  place  where  the  limb  lay  motion- 
less. Carried  away  with  divine  frenzy,  be  rushed  at  it, 
seized  it  with  his  teeth,  tore  through  the  skin,  and  eat  into 
its  throat.  When  it  was  quite  dead,  he  was  lifted  up  ; 
a  dishful  of  the  meat-ofifering  was  presented  to  him  ;  he 
thrust  his  blood-stained  face  into  it,  and  it  was  then  buried 
with  the  remains  of  the  lamb  beside  the  altar.  After  that, 
his  arms  were  untied,  and  he  fled  the  place.  I  may  add 
that  as  a  rule  the  slaughterer  of  the  god  everywhere  has  to 
fly  from  the  vengeance  of  his  worshippers,  who,  after  par- 
ticipating in  the  attack,  pretend  indignation  as  soon  as  the 
sacrifice  is  completed. 

The  rest  of  the  party  now  adjourned  to  the  front  of  the 
temple,  where  a  heap  of  grain  deposited  on  the  first  day  was 
divided  among  all  the  cultivators,  to  be  sown  by  each  one 
in  the  field  with  his  piece  of  flesh.  After  this,  a  distribu- 
tion was  made  of  the  piled-up  heads  of  the  bufifaloes  and 
sheep  slfughtered  on  the  third  and  fourth  days.  These 
were  evidently  considered  as  sacred  as  divine  heads  gen- 
erally in  all  countries  and  ages.  About  forty  of  the  sheeps' 
heads  were  divided  among  certain  privileged  persons  ;  for 
the  remainder,  a  general  scramble  took  place,  men  of  all 
castes  soon  rolling  together  on  the  ground  in  a  mess  f 
putrid  gore.  For  the  buffaloes'  heads,  only  the  Pariahs 
contended.  Whoever  was  fortunate  enough  to  secure  one 
of  either  kind  carried  it  oflf  and  buried  it  in  his  field.  Of 
the  special  importance  of  the  head  in  all  such  sacrifices, 
Mr.  Gomme  has  collected  many  apposite  examples. 

The  proceedings  were  terminated  by  a  procession  round 
the  boundaries  ;  the  burial  of  the  head  of  the  sacred  buf- 
falo close  to  the  shrine  of  the  village  goddess  ;  and  the 
outbreak  of  a  perfect  orgy,  a  "  rule  of  misrule, "  during 
which  the  chief  musician  indulged  in  unbridled  abuse  of  all 
the  authorities,  native  or  British. 


'.' 


304 


CORN-  AND  WINE-GODS. 


I  have  given  at  such  length  an  account  of  this  singular 
festival,  partly  because  it  sheds  light  upon  much  that  has 
gone  before,  but  partly  also  because  it  helps  to  explain 
many  elements  in  the  worship  of  the  great  corn-  and  wine- 
gods.  One  point  of  cardinal  importance  to  be  noticed 
here  is  that  the  officiating  priest,  who  was  at  one  time  also 
both  god  and  victim,  is  called  Potraj  like  the  deity  whom 
he  represents.  So,  too,  in  Phrygia  the  combined  Attis- 
victim  and  Attis-priest  bore  the  name  of  Attis  ;  and  so  in 
Egypt  the  annual  Osiris-ofTering  bore  the  name  of  Osiris, 
whom  he  represented. 

If  I  am  right,  therefore,  in  the  analogy  of  the  two  feasts 
Dionysus  was  in  his  origin  a  corn-god,  and  later  a  vine- 
god,  annually  slain  and  buried  in  order  that  his  blood 
might  fertilise  the  field  or  the  vineyard.     In  the  Homeric 
period,  he  was  still  a  general  god  of  cultivation  :  only  later 
did  he  become  distinctively  the  grape-god  and  wine-deity. 
There  was  originally,  I  believe,  a  Dionysus  in  every  vil- 
lage ;  and  this  divine  victim  was  annually  offered,  himself 
to   himself,    with    orgiastic    rites   like    those    of   Potraj. 
Mr.  Laurence  Gomme  has  already  in  part  pointed  out  this 
equation  of  the  Hellenic  and  the  Indian  custom.     The 
earliest   form  of  Dionysus-worship,  on  this   hypothesis, 
would  be  the  one  which  survived  in  Chios  and  Tenedos, 
where  a  living  human  being  was  orgiastically  torn  to 
pieces  at  the  feast  of  Dionysus.     At  Orchomenus,  the  hu- 
man victim  was  by  custom  a  woman  of  the  family  of  the 
Oleiae  (so  that  there  were  women  Dionysi) :  at  the  annual 
festival,  the  priest  of  Dionysus  pursued  these  women  with 
a  drawn  sword,  and  if  he  caught  one,  he  had  the  right  to 
slay  her.     (This  is  the  sacred-chance  victim.)     In  other 
places,  the  ceremony  had  been  altered  in  historical  times  ; 
thus  at  Potniae,  in  Boeotia,  it  was  once  the  custom  to  slay  a 
child  as  Dionysus  ;  but  later  on,  a  goat,  which  was  identi- 
fied with  the  god,  was  substituted  for  the  original  human 
victim.     The  equivalence  of  the  animal  victim  with  the 
human  god  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  at  Tenedos  the  new- 


ii 


;i        (   ■ 


DIONYSUS  AS  CORN-GOD. 


305 


lew- 


born  calf  sacrificed  to  Dionysus — or  as  Dionysus — was 
shod  in  buskins,  while  the  mother  cow  was  tended  like  a 
woman  in  childbed. 

Elsewhere  we  find  other  orgiastic  rites  still  more  closely 
resembling  the  Indian  pattern.  Among  the  Cretans,  a 
Dionysus  was  sacrificed  biennially  under  the  form  of  a 
bull  ;  and  the  worshippers  tore  the  living  animal  to  pieces 
wildly  with  their  teeth.  Indeed,  says  Mr.  Frazer,  the 
rending  and  devouring  of  live  bulls  and  calves  seems  to 
have  been  a  regular  feature  of  the  Dionysiac  rites.  In 
some  cities,  again,  the  animal  that  took  tue  place  of  the 
human  victim  was  a  kid.  When  the  followers  of  Diony- 
sus tore  in  pieces  a  live  goat  and  drank  its  blood,  they  be- 
lieved they  were  devouring  the  actual  body  and  blood  of 
the  god.  This  eating  and  drinking  the  god  is  an  impor- 
tant point,  which  will  detain  us  again  at  a  later  stage  of 
our  enquiry. 

I  do  not  desire  to  dwell  too  long  upon  any  one  deity,  or 
rLiher  class  of  deities  ;  therefore  I  will  say  briefly  here  that 
when  Dionysus  became  the  annual  or  biennial  vine-god 
victim,  it  was  inevitable  that  his  worshippers  should  have 
seen  his  resurrection  and  embodiment  in  the  vine,  and 
should  have  regarded  the  wine  it  yielded  as  the  blood  of 
the  god.  In  this  case,  the  identification  was  particularly 
natural,  for  could  not  every  worshipper  feel  the  god  in  the 
wine  ?  and  did  not  the  divine  spirit  within  it  inspire  and 
intoxicate  him  ?  To  be  "  full  of  the  god "  was  the 
natural  expression  for  the  resulting  exhilaration  ;  the  cult 
of  the  wine-spirit  is  thus  one  of  those  which  stands  on  the 
surest  and  most  intimate  personal  basis. 

The  death  and  resurrection  of  Dionysus  are  accordingly 
a  physical  reality.  The  god  is  annually  killed  in  the  flesh, 
as  man,  bull,  or  goat  ;  and  he  rises  again  in  the  vine,  to  give 
his  blood  once  more  for  the  good  of  his  votaries.  More- 
over, he  may  be  used  as  a  fertiliser  for  many  other  trees  ; 
and  so  we  find  Dionysus  has  many  functions.  He  is  va- 
riously adored  as  Dionysus  of  the  tree,  and  more  particu- 


f:d 


1    !*? 


W. 


306 


CORN-  AND  IVINE-GODS. 


larly  of  the  fruit-bearing  fig  and  apple.  His  image,  like 
those  of  other  tree-gods  already  encountered,  was  often  an 
upright  post,  without  arms,  but  draped  (like  the  ashera) 
in  a  mantle,  and  with  a  bearded  mask  to  represent  the 
head,  while  green  boughs  projecting  from  it  marked  his 
vegetable  character.  He  was  the  patron  of  cultivated 
trees  ;  prayers  were  offered  to  him  to  make  trees  grow  ; 
he  was  honoured  by  fruit-growers,  who  set  up  an  image 
of  him,  in  the  shape  of  a  natural  tree-stump,  in  the  midst 
of  their  orchards.  (Compare  that  last  degraded  and  utili- 
tarian relic,  the  modern  scarecrow.)  For  other  equally 
interesting  facts,  I  would  refer  the  reader  once  more  to 
Mr.  Frazer,  whose  rich  store  I  must  not  further  rifle.  It 
seems  to  me  obvious  from  his  collection  of  facts  that  there 
was  originally  everywhere  a  separate  local  Dionysus,  an 
annual  man-god  or  woman-god  victim  (for  which  a  bepst 
was  later  substituted),  and  that  only  slowly  did  the  worship 
of  the  individual  Dionysi  pass  into  the  general  worship  of 
one  great  idealised  god  Dionysus.  The  great  gods  are  at 
first  classes,  not  individuals. 

Mr.  Gomme  has  further  pointed  out  three  interesting 
points  of  resemblance  between  the  Dionysiac  rites  and  the 
Indian  Potraj  festival.  In  the  first  place,  Dionysus  is 
sometimes  represented  to  his  worshippers  by  his  head 
only — no  doubt  a  preserved  oracular  head  ;  and  in  any 
case  a  parallel  to  the  importance  of  the  head  in  the  Indian 
ceremony.  In  the  second  place,  the  sacrificer  of  the  calf 
at  Tenedos  was  driven  out  and  stoned  after  the  fulfilment 
of  the  rite — a  counterpart  of  the  Potraj  fleeing  from  the 
place  after  the  slaughter  of  the  lamb.  And  in  the  third 
place,  the  women  worshippers  of  Dionysus  attended  the 
rites  nude,  crowned  with  garlands,  and  daubed  over  with 
dirt — a  counterpart  of  the  naked  female  votaries  sur- 
rounded with  branches  of  trees  in  the  Indian  festival.  All 
three  of  these  points  recur  abundantly  in  similar  cere- 
monies elsewhere. 

As  a  rule,  I  severely  disregard  mere  myths,  as  darkeners 


i 


THE  HUMAN  DIONYSUS 


207 


re- 


;rs 


of  counsel,  confining  my  attention  to  the  purely  religious 
and  practical  elements  of  custom  and  worship.  But  it  is 
worth  while  noting  here  for  its  illustrative  value  the  Cre- 
tan Dionysus-myth,  preserved  for  us  in  a  Romanised  form 
by  Firmicus  Maternus.  Dionysus  is  there  represented  as 
the  son  of  Zeus,  a  Cretan  king  ;  and  this  legend,  dis- 
missed cavalierly  by  Mr.  Frazer  as  "  Euhemeristic,"  at 
least  encloses  the  old  idea  that  the  Dionysus-victim  was  at 
first  himself  a  divine  god-king,  connected  by  blood  with 
the  supreme  god  or  founder  of  the  community.  Hera, 
the  wife  of  Zeus,  was  jealous  of  the  child,  and  lured  him 
into  an  ambush,  where  he  was  set  upon  by  her  satellites  the 
Titans,  who  cut  him  limb  from  limb,  boiled  his  body  with 
various  herbs,  and  ate  it.  Other  forms  of  the  myth  tell 
us  how  his  mother  Demeter  pieced  together  his  mangled 
remains,  and  made  him  young  again.  More  often,  how- 
ever, Dionysus  is  the  son  of  Semele,  and  various  other  ver- 
sions are  given  of  the  mode  of  his  resurrection.  It  is 
enough  for  our  purpose  that  in  all  of  them  the  wine-god» 
after  having  been  slain  and  torn  limb  from  limb,  rises 
again  from  the  dead,  and  often  ascends  to  his  father  Zeus 
in  heaven.  The  resurrection,  visibly  enacted,  formed  in 
many  places  a  part  of  the  rite  ;  though  I  cannot  agree  with 
Mr.  Frazer's  apparent  and  (for  him)  unusual  suggestion 
that  the  rite  grew  out  of  the  myth  ;  I  hold  the  exact  oppo- 
site to  have  been  the  order  of  evolution. 

On  the  whole,  then,  though  I  do  not  deny  that  the  later 
Greeks  envisaged  Dionysus  as  a  single  supreme  god  of  ve- 
getation, nor  that  many  abstract  ideas  were  finally  fathered 
upon  the  worship — especially  those  which  identified  the 
death  and  resurrection  of  the  god  with  the  annual  winter 
sleep  and  spring  revival — I  maintain  that  in  his  origin  the 
Dionysus  was  nothing  more  than  the  annual  corn-victim, 
afterwards  extended  into  the  tree  and  vine  victim,  from 
whose  grave  sprang  the  pomegranate,  that  blood-red  fruit, 
and  whose  life-juice  was  expressed  as  the  god-giving  wine. 
At  first  a  yearly  human  victim,  he  was  afterwards  perso- 


ill 


3o8 


CORN-  AND  WINE-CODS. 


I 


nated  by  a  goat  or  a  bull  ;  and  was  therefore  represented  in 
art  as  a  bull,  or  a  bull-horned  man.  Gradually  identified 
with  vegetation  in  general,  he  was  regarded  at  last  as  the 
Flowery  Dionysus,  the  Fig  Dionysus,  or  even,  like  Attis, 
the  god  of  the  pine-tree.  But  all  these,  1  believe,  were  later 
syncretic  additions  ;  and  I  consider  that  in  such  primitive 
forms  as  the  orgiastic  crop-god  of  the  Indian  corn-festival 
we  get  the  prime  original  of  the  Hellenic  vine-deity. 

I  pass  on  to  Osiris,  in  his  secondary  or  acquired  charac- 
ter as  corn-god. 

I  have  already  expressed  the  belief,  in  which  I  am 
backed  up  by  Mr.  Loftie,  that  the  original  Osiris  was  a  real 
historical  early  king  of  This  by  Abydos.  But  in  the  later 
Egyptian  religion,  after  mystic  ideas  had  begun  to  be 
evolved,  he  came  to  be  regarded  as  the  god  of  the  dead, 
and  every  mummy  or  every  justified  soul  was  looked  upon 
as  an  Osiris.  Moreover,  it  seems  probable  that  in  Egypt 
the  name  of  Osiris  was  also  fitted  to  the  annual  slain  corn- 
victim  or  corn-god.  Thus  all  over  Egypt  there  were 
many  duplicates  of  Osiris  ;  notably  at  Busiris,  where  the 
name  was  attached  to  an  early  tomb  like  the  one  at  Aby- 
dos. This  identification  of  the  new-made  god  with  the  his- 
toric ancestor,  the  dead  king,  or  the  tribal  deity  is  quite 
habitual  ;  it  is  parallel  to  the  identification  of  the  officiating 
Potraj  with  the  Potraj  god,  of  the  Attis-priest  with  Attis, 
of  the  Dionysus-victim  with  the  son  of  Zeus:  and  it  will 
meet  us  hereafter  in  savage  parallels.  Let  us  look  at  the 
evidence. 

As  in  India,  the  Osiris  festival  lasted  for  five  days.  (The 
period  is  worth  noting.)  The  ceremonies  began  with 
ploughing  the  earth.  We  do  not  know  for  certain  that  a 
human  victim  was  immolated  ;  but  many  side-analogies 
would  lead  us  to  that  conclusion,  and  suggest  that  as  else- 
where the  sacred  victim  was  torn  to  pieces  in  the  eager- 
ness of  the  cultivators  and  worshippers  to  obtain  a  frag- 
ment of  his  fertilising  body.  For  in  the  myth,  Typhon 
cuts  up  the  corpse  of  the  god  into  fourteen  pieces,  which 


i!  m\ 


OSIRIS  AS  CORN-GOD. 


309 


he  scatters  abroad  (as  the  naked  leather-dresser  scatters 
the  sacred  buffalo)  :  and  we  know  that  in  the  Egyptian 
ct.emonies  one  chief  element  was  the  search  fo**  the 
mangled  portions  of  Osiris,  the  rejoicings  at  their  disco- 
very, and  their  solemn  burial.  On  one  of  the  days  of  the 
feast,  a  procession  of  priests  went  the  round  of  the  temples 
— or  beat  the  bounds  :  and  the  festival  closed  with  the 
erection  of  a  pillar  or  stone  monument  to  the  Osiris,  which, 
in  a  bas-relief,  the  king  himself  is  represented  as  assisting 
in  raising.  I  think  it  is  impossible  to  overlook  the  general 
resemblance  of  these  rites  to  the  rites  of  Potraj. 

I  ought  to  add,  though  I  cannot  go  into  that  matter 
fully  here,  that  the  many  allusions  to  the  flinging  of  the 
coffer  containing  the  Osiris  into  the  Nile  are  clear  indi- 
cations of  the  rain-charm  obtained  by  throwing  the  human 
victim  into  a  spring  or  river.  In  this  case,  however,  it 
must  of  course  be  regarded  locally  as  a  charm  to  make  the 
Nile  rise  in  due  season. 

The  character  of  the  later  Osiris,  or  the  god-victim 
identified  with  him,  as  a  corn  and  vegetable  god,  is  amply 
borne  out  by  several  other  pieces  of  evidence.  Osiris,  it  is 
said,  was  the  first  to  teach  men  the  use  of  corn.  He  also 
introduced  the  cultivation  of  the  vine.  Mr.  Frazer  notes 
that  in  one  of  the  chambers  dedicated  to  Osiris  in  the  great 
temple  of  Isis  at  Philae,  the  dead  body  of  Osiris  is  repre- 
sented with  stalks  of  corn  springing  from  it,  and  a  priest 
is  watering  the  stalks  from  a  pitcher  which  he  holds  in  his 
hand.  That  human  corn-victims  were  at  least  not  un- 
known in  Egypt  we  have  on  the  direct  authority  of 
Manetho,  who  tells  us  that  red-haired  men  used  to  be 
burned,  and  their  ashes  scattered  with  winnowing  fans. 
(Similar  cases  elsewhere  have  been  previously  mentioned.) 
So,  too,  the  legend  tells  us  that  Isis  placed  the  severed 
limbs  of  Osiris  on  a  corn-sieve.  Red-haired  oxen  were 
also  sacrificed  in  Egypt,  apparently  in  order  to  produce 
red  wheat.  This  is  the  analogue  of  the  bull  sacrificed  as 
Dionysus. 


h^  I 


fi 


mm 


I' 

I 


i   \H: 


'.     Wv 


310 


CORN-  AND  WINE-GODS. 


%  I ' 


Again,  in  the  legend  of  Busiris,  and  the  glosses  or  com- 
ments upon  it,  we  get  important  evidence,  the  value  of 
which  has  noc  fully  been  noted,  I  believe,  by  Mr.  Frazer. 
The  story  comes  to  us  in  a  Greek  form  ;  but  we  can  see 
through  it  that  it  represents  the  myth  which  accounted 
for  the  Osiris  sacrifice.  The  name  Busiris  means  the  city 
of  Osiris,  which  was  so  called  because  the  grave  of  an 
ancient  Osiris  (either  a  mummy,  or  a  local  chief  identified 
with  the  great  god  of  Abydos)  was  situated  there.  Hu- 
man sacrifices  were  said  to  have  been  offered  at  his  tomb  ; 
just  as  the  Potraj  sacrifice  is  offered  at  the  shrine  of  the 
village  goddess,  and  just  as  the  annual  victim  elsewhere 
was  sacrificed  at  the  Terminus  stone  or  the  sacred  stone 
of  the  foundation-god  or  goddess.  The  victims  were  red- 
haired  men,  and  strangers.  Their  ashes  were  scattered 
abroad  with  winnowing  fans.  They  were  slain  on  the  har- 
vest-field, and  mourned  by  the  reapers  (like  Adonis  and 
Attis)  in  the  song  which  through  a  Greek  mistake  is 
known  to  us  as  the  Maneros.  The  reapers  prayed  at  the 
same  time  that  Osiris  might  revive  and  return  with  renewed 
vigour  in  the  following  year.  The  most  interesting  point 
in  this  account,  pieced  together  from  Apollodorus,  Diodo- 
rus,  and  Plutarch,  is  the  fact  that  it  shows  us  how  the 
annual  Osiris  was  identified  with  the  old  divine  king  who 
lay  in  his  grave  hard  by  ;  and  so  brings  the  case  into  line 
with  others  we  have  already  considered  and  must  still  con- 
sider. As  for  the  hunting  after  the  pieces  of  Osiris's  body, 
that  is  just  like  the  hunting  after  the  mangled  pieces  of 
Dionysus  by  Demeter.  I  interpret  both  the  resurrection 
o'  Osiris,  and  the  story  of  the  fragments  beings  pieced  to- 
gether and  growing  young  again,  told  of  Dionysus,  as 
meaning  that  the  scattered  pieces,  buried  like  those  of  the 
Khond  Meriah,  grow  up  again  next  year  into  the  living 
corn  for  the  harvest. 

Furthermore,  there  exists  to  this  day  in  Egypt  an  ap- 
parent survival  of  the  ancient  Osiris  rite,  in  an  attenuated 
form  (like  the  mock  mayors  in  England),  which  distinctly 


T 


THE  YEARLY  OSIRIS   VICTIM. 


?TI 


suggests  the  identification  I  am  here  attempting.  In 
Upper  Egypt,  Klunzinger  tells  us,  on  the  first  day  of  the 
(Egyptian)  solar  year,  when  the  Nile  has  usually  reached 
its  highest  point,  the  regular  government  is  suspended  for 
three  days  in  each  district,  and  every  town  chooses  its  own 
temporary  ruler.  This  temporary  king  (a  local  Osiris,  as 
I  believe)  wears  a  conical  cap,  and  a  long  flaxen  beard,  and 
is  enveloped  in  a  strange  mantle.  I  say  unhesitatingly,  the 
dress  of  an  Osiris,  wearing  the  old  royal  cap  of  Upper 
Egypt.  With  a  wand  of  office  in  his  hands — like  the 
crook  which  Osiris  carries  on  the  monuments — and  at- 
tended by  men  disguised  as  scribes,  executioners,  and  so 
forth,  he  proceeds  to  the  governor's  house.  The  gov- 
ernor allows  himself  to  be  deposed;  the  mock  king,  mount- 
ing the  throne,  holds  a  tribunal,  to  whose  decisions  even 
the  governor  himself  must  bow.  In  short,  like  other  tem- 
porary kings,  he  really  enjoys  royal  authority  for  the  mo- 
ment. After  three  days,  however,  the  mock  king  is  con- 
demned to  death;  the  envelope  or  shell  in  which  he  is 
encased  is  committed  to  the  flames  ;  and  from  its  ashes 
creeps  forth  the  Fellah  who  impersonated  him.  I  do  not 
doubt  that  the  case  here  represents  the  antique  coffer  or 
mummy-case  of  Osiris. 

In  this  graphic  ceremonial,  then,  I  see  a  survival,  with 
the  customary  mitigations,  of  the  annual  Osiris  sacrifice, 
once  actually  performed  on  a  human  victim.  I  do  not 
doubt  that  in  Egypt  as  elsewhere  a  mock  king  was  for- 
merly chosen  in  place  of  the  real  king  to  personate  the  de- 
scendant of  Osiris,  an  Osiris  himself ;  and  that  this  substi- 
tute was  put  to  death,  and  torn  to  pieces  or  burnt,  while 
his  ashes  were  winnowed  and  scattered  over  the  land.  It 
may  also  be  worth  while  to  enquire  whether  the  scourge 
which  Osiris  holds  in  the  bas-reliefs  is  not  the  equivalent 
of  the  divine  whip  of  the  Potraj,  anc'  the  other  whips  which 
Mr.  Gomme  has  so  ingeniously  correlated  with  that  very 
venerable  and  mystic  attribute. 

I  would  suggest,  then,  that  Osiris  in  his  later  embodi- 


lit 


ill'l 


^i- 


' 


312 


CORN-  AND   WINE-GODS. 


ment  was  annually  renewed  as  a  corn  and  vine  victim. 
Originally  a  king  of  Upper  Egypt,  or  part  of  it,  he  was  en- 
visaged in  later  myth  as  a  general  culture-god.  Isis,  hiy 
sister  and  wife,  discovered  wheat  and  barley  growing  wild; 
and  Osiris  introduced  these  grains  among  his  people,  who 
thereupon  abandoned  cannibalism,  and  took  to  grain- 
growing.  An  annual  victim,  most  often  a  stranger,  iden- 
tified with  the  racial  god,  was  torn  to  pieces  in  his  place  ; 
and  Osiris  himself  was  finally  merged  with  the  abstract 
spirit  of  vegetation,  and  supposed  to  be  the  parent  of  all 
trees.  Just  as  the  Corinthians,  when  ordered  by  an  oracle 
to  v/orship  a  certain  pine  tree  "equally  with  the  god,"  cut 
it  down  and  made  two  images  of  Dionysus  out  of  it,  with 
gilt  bodies  and  red-stained  faces  ;  so  the  Egyptians  cut 
down  a  pine-tree,  took  out  the  heart,  made  an  image  of 
Osiris,  and  then  buried  it  in  the  hollow  of  the  tree  from 
which  it  had  been  taken.  Similar  rites  obtained  in  Attis- 
worship  ;  and  all  alike  bear  witness  to  that  late  and  ab- 
stract stage  of  thought  where  the  primitive  cultivation- 
victim  has  been  sublimated  and  elevated  into  a  generalised 
god  of  vegetation  in  the  abstract.  But  this,  which  for  Mr. 
Frazer  is  the  starting-point,  is  for  me  the  goal  of  the  evo- 
lution of  Osiris. 

Let  us  next  look  very  briefly  at  the  case  of  Adonis. 

The  Adon  or  Lord  commonly  known  as  Thammuz 
was  one  of  the  chief  elements  in  Syrian  religion.  He  was 
closely  connected  with  the  namesake  river  Adonis,  which 
rose  by  his  grave  at  the  sacred  spring  of  Aphaca.  We  do 
not  actually  know,  I  believe,  of  a  human  Adonis-victim  ; 
but  his  death  was  annually  lamented  with  a  bitter  wailing, 
chiefly  by  women.  Images  of  him  were  dressed  like 
corpses,  and  carried  out  as  if  for  burial,  and  then  thrown 
into  the  sea  or  into  springs.  This  was  evidently  a  rain 
charm,  such  as  is  particularly  natural  in  a  dry  country  like 
Syria.  And  I  will  add  incidentally  that  I  attribute  to  sim- 
ilar circumstances  also  some  portion  at  least  of  the  sanctity 
of  rivers.     In  certain  places,  the  resurrection  of  the  Adonis 


ADONIS  AND  ATTIS. 


313 


S 


was  celebrated  on  the  succeeding  day.  At  Byblos,  he  also 
ascended  into  heaven  before  the  eyes  of  his  worshippers — 
a  point  worth  notice  from  its  Christian  analogies.  The 
blood-red  hue  of  the  river  Adonis  in  spring — really  due  to 
the  discoloration  of  the  tributary  torrents  by  red  earth 
from  the  mountains — was  set  down  to  the  blood  of  the 
god  Adonis;  the  scarlet  anemone  sprang  from  his  wounds. 
But  the  scholiast  on  Theocritus  expressly  explains  the 
Adonis  as  "  the  sown  corn;"  and  that  he  was  "  seed,"  like 
the  common  corn-victims  in  India  and  elsewhere,  we  can 
hardly  doubt  from  the  repeated  stories  of  his  death  and 
resurrection.  The  so-called  "  gardens  of  Adonis,"  which 
were  mimic  representations  of  a  tumulus  planted  with 
corn,  formed  a  most  noticeable  part  of  the  god's  ritual. 
They  consisted  of  baskets  or  pot  filled  with  earth,  in 
which  wheat,  barley,  flowers,  and  so  forth  were  sown  and 
tended  by  women  ;  and  at  the  end  of  eight  days  they  were 
carried  out  with  the  images  of  the  dead  Adonis,  and  flung 
into  the  sea  or  into  springs.  This  was  no  doubt  another 
case  of  a  rain-charm.  Mr.  Frazer  has  collected  several  in- 
teresting examples  of  similar  rites  the  whole  world  over. 

A  few  other  embodiments  of  the  corn-god  may  be  more 
hastily  treated. 

What  Adonis  was  to  Syria,  Attis  was  to  Phrygia.  Origi- 
nally he  seems,  according  to  Professor  Ramsay,  to  have 
been  represented  by  an  annual  priest-victim,  who  slew  him- 
self for  the  people  to  ensure  fertility.  This  priest-victim 
himself  bore  the  name  of  Attis,  and  was  identified  with  the 
god  whose  worship  he  performed.  In  later  days,  instead  of 
killing  himself,  he  merely  drew  his  own  blood  ;  and  there 
is  reason  to  think  that  a  pig  was  also  substituted  as  dupli- 
catevictim,  and  that  this  pig  was  itself  regarded  as  an  Attis. 
Analogies  exist  with  the  Paschal  lamb  ;  while  the  self-mu- 
tilation of  Attis-worship  has  also  features  in  common  with 
Jewish  circumcision.  Moreover,  the  ceremonies  were 
closely  connected,  at  Pessinus  at  least,  with  the  ancient 
sacred  stone  which  bore  the  name  of  Cybele,  and  which 


i 


I . 


\i 


T 


314 


CORN-  AND  WINE-GODS. 


il 


11':  I 


n 

IS 

|: 

I                ■' 

il 

t   ■ 

i 

i 

1 

|^^!|  , 

r 

was  described  as  the  Mother  of  the  Gods  ;  this  connexion 
exactly  recalls  that  of  the  Potraj-god  in  India  with  the  cult 
of  the  local  village  goddess.  As  I  believe  the  village  god- 
dess to  be  the  permanent  form  of  the  foundation  human 
sacrifice,  I  also  believe  Cybele  (gross  Euhemerism  as  it 
may  seem)  to  be  the  sacred  stone  of  the  original  virgin 
who  was  sacrificed  at  the  first  foundation  of  Pessinus. 

When  the  sacred  stone  of  Cybele  and  the  cult  of  Attis 
were  removed  to  Rome  (under  circumstances  to  which  I 
shall  refer  in  a  later  chapter)  the  festival  consisted  of  a  five 
days'  rite,  like  that  of  the  Potraj.  It  took  place  at  the 
spring  equinox,  as  does  our  own  equivalent  festival  of  Eas- 
ter. On  the  first  day,  a  pine-tree  was  cut  down  in  the 
woods,  and  the  efifigy  of  a  young  man  was  tied  to  it.  This 
effigy  no  doubt  represented  the  primitive  human  sacrifice, 
and  its  crucifixion  answers  exactly  to  the  slaughter  of  the 
sacred  bufifalo  in  India.  The  second  day  yields  nothing  of 
importance  ;  on  the  third  day,  the  Attis-priest  drew  blood 
from  his  own  arms  and  presented  it  as  an  offering  ;  I  would 
conjecture  that  this  was  a  substitute  for  self-immolation,  and 
that  the  self-immolation  was  originally  performed  by  mu- 
tilation of  the  genitals.  It  was  perhaps  on  this  night  that  a 
mourning  took  place  over  the  body  of  Attis,  represented  by 
an  effigy,  which  was  afterwards  solemnly  buried.  On  the 
fourth  day  came  the  Festival  of  Joy,  on  which,  as  Mr.  Fra- 
zer  believes,  the  resurrection  of  the  god  was  celebrated. 
The  fifth  day  closed  with  a  procession  to  the  brook  Almo, 
in  which  the  sacred  stone  of  the  goddess  and  her  bullock- 
cart  were  bathed  as  a  rain-charm.  On  the  return,  the  cart 
was  strewn  with  flowers.  I  think  the  close  parallelism  to 
the  Indian  usage  is  here  fairly  evident.  Indeed,  out  of 
consideration  for  brevity,  I  have  suppressed  several  other 
most  curious  resemblances. 

Attis  was  thus  essentially  a  corn-god.  His  death  and 
resurrection  were  annually  celebrated  at  Rome  and  at  Pes- 
sinus. An  Attis  of  some  sort  died  yearly.  The  Attis  of 
Pessinus  was  both  priest  and  king  ;  it  was  perhaps  at  one 


i 


THE  CORN-MOTHER. 


315 


nd 

es- 

of 

■>ne 


time  his  duty  to  die  at  the  end  of  his  yearly  reign  as  a  corn- 
god  for  his  people.  One  epithet  of  Attis  was  "  v;:ry  fruit- 
ful ";  he  was  addressed  as  "the  reaped  yellow  ear  of  com"; 
and  when  an  effigy  took  the  place  of  the  annual  slain 
priest-king,  this  effigy  itself  was  kept  for  a  year,  and  then 
burnt  as  the  priest-king  himself  would  have  been  at  an 
earlier  period.  It  seems  to  me  impossible  to  resist  the 
cumulative  weight  of  this  singular  evidence. 

For  the  very  curious  customs  and  myths  regarding  De- 
meter,  Persephone,  and  other  female  corn-victims,  I  must 
refer  the  reader  once  more  to  Mr.  Frazer.  It  is  true,  the 
enquirer  will  there  find  the  subject  treated  from  the  oppo- 
site standpoint;  he  will  see  the  goddesses  regarded  as  first 
corn-spirits,  then  animal,  finally  human:  but  after  the  ex- 
amples I  have  here  given  of  my  own  mode  of  envisaging 
the  facts,  I  think  the  reader  will  see  for  himself  what  cor- 
rections to  make  for  Mr.  Frazer's  animism  and  personal 
equation.  I  will  only  say  here  that  in  many  countries, 
from  Peru  to  Africa,  a  girl  or  woman  seems  to  have  been 
ofifered  up  as  a  corn-goddess;  that  this  corn-goddess  seems 
to  have  been  sown  with  the  seed,  and  believed  to  come  to 
life  again  with  the  corn  ;  and  that  several  European  har- 
vest customs  appear  to  be  mitigations  of  the  old  ceremo- 
nial, with  the  usual  substitution  of  an  animal  or  an  efifigy 
for  the  human  victim.  Regarded  in  this  light,  Mr.  Fra- 
zer's collection  of  facts  about  the  Corn  Baby  aflfords  an  ex- 
cellent groundwork  for  research  ;  but  though  I  could  say 
much  on  the  subject,  I  will  refrain  from  it  here,  as  I  desire 
only  at  present  to  give  such  an  outline  as  will  enable  the 
reader  to  understand  my  general  principles.  The  half  is 
often  more  than  the  whole  ;  and  I  fear  if  I  flesh  out  the 
framework  too  much,  it  may  be  difficult  to  follow  the  main 
line  of  my  argument. 

I  cannot,  however,  refrain  from  mentioning  that  the 
ceremonies  of  "  Carrying  out  Death  "  and  "  Burying  the 
Carnival,"  which  prevail  all  over  Europe,  retain  many  in- 
teresting features  of  the   Potraj,   Dionysus,   and   Attis- 


W 

II' 


I! 


r 


316 


CORN-  AND  WINE-GODS. 


'J- ' 

■ 

•    1 

r     ' 

ill  ■ 

-m 

rr 


m 


i 


■1; 


Adonis  festivals.  The  figure  of  Death — that  is  to  say,  as 
I  understand  it,  the  image  of  the  deau  human  god — is 
often  torn  to  pieces,  and  the  fragments  ttre  then  buried  in 
the  fields  to  make  the  crops  grow  well.  But  the  Death  is 
also  drowned  or  burned  ;  in  the  first  case,  like  Adonis,  in 
the  second,  like  the  Osiris  in  the  modern  Egyptian  custom. 
And  the  analogies  of  the  festivals  to  those  of  India  and 
Western  Asia  must  strike  every  attentive  reader  of  Mr. 
Frazer's  masterwork. 

Two  or  three  typical  instances  must  suffice  as  examples. 
In  Bohemia,  the  children  carry  a  straw  man  out  of  the  vil- 
lage, calling  it  Death,  and  then  burn  it,  singing, 

Now  carry  we  Death  out  of  the  village, 
The  new  summer  into  the  village  ; 
Welcome,  dear  summer, 
Green  little  corn. 

Here  the  relation  of  the  ceremony  to  the  primitive  corn- 
sacrifice  is  immediately  evident.  And  the  making  of  the 
effigy  out  of  straw  is  significant.  At  Tabor  in  Bohemia 
the  image  of  Death  is  flung  from  a  high  rock  into  the 
water,  evidently  as  a  rain-charm,  with  a  similar  song,  pray- 
ing for  "  good  wheat  and  rye."  (Compare  the  ceremony 
of  the  Tarpeian  rock,  where  the  victim  was  at  last  a  con- 
demned criminal  :  as  also  the  myths  of  immolation  by 
jumping  into  the  sea.)  In  Lower  Bavaria  the  pantomime 
was  more  realistic  ;  the  Pfingstl,  as  the  victim  was  called, 
was  clad  in  leaves  and  flowers,  and  drenched  with  water. 
He  waded  into  a  brook  up  to  his  middle,  while  a  boy  pre- 
tended to  cut  oflf  his  head.  In  Saxony  and  Thuringen,  the 
Wild  Man,  who  represents  the  god,  is  killed  in  dumb  show 
at  Whitsuntide.  His  captors  pretend  to  shoot  him,  and 
he  falls  as  if  dead,  but  is  afterwards  revived,  as  in  the  resur- 
rection of  Adonis  and  Dionysus.  Such  resurrections  form 
a  common  episode  in  the  popular  corn-drama.  I  have 
found  a  case  in  Sussex.  At  Semic  in  Bohemia  we  have  the 
further  graphic  point  that  the  victim  is  actually  described 
as  the  King,  wears  a  crown  of  bark,  and  carries  a  wand 


A 


DEGRADED  CORN-GODS. 


317 


1 


\n 


as  a  sceptre,  like  the  mock  Osiris.  Other  kings  are  fre- 
quent elsewhere.  In  the  Koniggratz  district,  the  King  is 
tried,  and,  if  condemned,  is  beheaded  in  pantomime. 
Near  Schomberg,  the  mock  victim  used  to  be  known  as 
the  Fool,  another  significant  name,  and  was  finally  buried 
under  straw  and  dung,  a  conjunction  of  obvious  agricul- 
tural import.  In  Rottweil,  the  Fool  is  made  drunk,  and 
interred  in  straw  amid  Adonis-like  lamentations.  Else- 
where, the  Fool,  either  in  person  or  by  a  straw  effigy,  is 
flung  into  water.  At  Schluckenau,  realism  goes  a  stage 
further  :  the  Wild  Man  wears  a  bladder  filled  with  blood 
round  his  neck  ;  this  the  executioner  stabs,  and  the  blood 
gushes  forth  on  the  ground.  Next  day,  a  straw  man, 
made  to  look  as  like  him  as  possible,  is  laid  on  a  bier,  and 
taken  to  a  pool  into  which  it  is  flung.  In  all  these  antique 
ceremonies  it  is  imposible  not  to  see  a  now  playful  survival 
of  the  primitive  corn-sacrifice.  Our  own  April  Fool  shows 
the  last  stage  of  degradation  in  such  world-wide  customs. 
Originally  sent  on  a  fool's  errand  to  the  place  of  sacrifice, 
so  that  he  might  go  voluntarily,  he  is  now  merely  sent  in 
meaningless  derision. 

I  will  only  add  here  that  while  corn-gods  and  wine- 
gods  are  the  most  notable  members  of  this  strange  group 
of  artificial  deities,  the  sacred  date-palm  has  its  importance 
as  well  in  the  religions  of  Mesopotamia  ;  and  elsewhere  the 
gods  of  the  maize,  the  plantain,  and  the  cocoanut  rise  into 
special  or  local  prominence.  So  do  the  Rice-Spirit,  the 
Oats- Wife,  the  Mother  of  the  Rye,  and  the  Mother  of  the 
Barley  (or  Demeter).  All  seem  to  be  modifications  of  the 
primitive  victim,  sacrificed  to  make  a  spirit  for  the  crop, 
or  to  act  as  "  seed  "  for  the  date  or  the  plantain. 


• ,  f 


■>,  1 1 


f 


;  I     r 


318 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


r 


\W.t 


Wm 


CHAPTER  XV. 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


We  have  now  arrived  at  a  point  where  wc  can  more 
fully  understand  those  curious  ideas  of  sacrifice  and  sacra- 
ment which  lie  at  the  root  of  so  much  that  is  essential  in 
the  Jewish,  the  Christian,  and  most  other  religions. 

Mr.  Galton  tells  us  that  to  the  Damaras,  when  he  tra- 
velled among  them,  all  meat  was  common  property.  No 
one  killed  an  ox  except  as  a  sacrifice  and  on  a  festal  occa- 
sion ;  and  when  the  ox  was  killed,  the  whole  community 
feasted  upon  it  indiscriminately.  This  is  but  a  single  in- 
stance of  a  feeling  almost  universal  among  primitive  pas- 
toral people.  Cattle  and  other  domestic  animals,  being 
regarded  as  sacred,  are  rarely  killed  ;  and  when  they  are 
killed,  they  are  eaten  at  a  feast  as  a  social  and  practically 
religious  rite — in  short,  sacramentally.  I  need  not  give 
instances  of  so  well-known  a  principle  ;  I  will  content  my- 
self with  quoting  what  Dr.  Robertson  Smith  says  of  a  par- 
ticular race  :  "  Among  the  early  Semites  generally,  no 
slaughter  was  legitimate  except  for  sacrifice." 

Barbaric  herdsmen,  indeed,  can  hardly  conceive  of  men 
to  whom  flesh  meat  is  a  daily  article  of  diet.  Mr.  Galton 
found  the  idea  very  strange  to  his  Damaras.  Primitive 
pastoral  races  keep  their  domestic  animals  mainly  for  the 
sake  of  the  milk,  or  as  beasts  of  burden,  or  for  the  wool  and 
hair  ;  they  seldom  kill  one  except  for  a  feast,  at  which  the 
gods  are  fellow-partakers.  Indeed,  it  is  probable,  as  the  se- 
quel will  suggest,  that  domestic  animals  were  originally 
kept  as  totems  or  ancestor-gods,  and  that  the  habit  of  eat- 


k 


v».' 


v. 


TWO  KINDS  OF  SACRIFICE. 


319 


)ar- 
no 


len 


tive 

I  the 

ind 

I  the 

se- 

dly 

mat- 


ing the  meat  of  sheep,  goats,  and  oxen  has  arisen  mainly 
out  of  the  substitution  of  such  a  divine  animal-victim  for 
the  divine  human-victim  of  earlier  usage.  Our  butchers' 
shops  have  their  origin  in  mitigated  sacrificial  cannibalism. 

Sacrifice,  regarded  merely  as  offering  to  the  gods,  has 
thus,  I  believe,  two  distinct  origins.  Its  earliest,  simplest, 
and  most  natural  form  is  that  whose  development  we  have 
already  traced, — the  placing  of  small  articles  of  food  and 
drink  at  the  graves  of  ancestors  or  kings  or  revered  fellow- 
tribesmen.  That  from  a  very  early  period  men  have  be- 
lieved the  dead  to  eat  and  drink,  whether  as  corpse,  as 
mummy,  as  ghost  of  buried  friend,  or  as  ethereal  spirit  of 
cremated  chieftain,  we  have  already  seen  with  sufficient 
frequency.  About  the  origin  of  these  simplest  and  most 
primitive  sacrifices,  I  think,  there  can  be  little  doubt. 
Savages  offer  at  the  graves  of  their  dead  precisely  those 
ordinary  articles  of  food  which  they  consumed  while  liv- 
ing, without  any  distinction  of  kind;  and  they  continue  to 
offer  them  in  the  same  naive  way  when  the  ghost  has  pro- 
gressed to  the  status  of  one  of  the  great  gods  of  the  com- 
munity. 

But  there  is  another  mode  of  sacrifice,  superposed  upon 
this,  and  gradually  tending  to  be  more  or  less  identified 
with  it,  which  yet,  if  I  am  right,  had  a  quite  different  origin 
in  the  artificial  production  of  gods  about  which  I  have 
written  at  considerable  length  in  the  last  three  chapters. 
The  human  or  animal  victim,  thus  slaughtered  in  order  to 
make  a  new  god  or  protecting  spirit,  came  in  time  to  be 
assimilated  in  thought  to  the  older  type  of  mere  hono- 
rific offerings  to  the  dead  gods;  and  so  gave  rise  to  those 
mystic  ideas  of  the  god  who  is  sacrificed,  himself  to  him- 
self, of  which  the  sacrament  of  the  Mass  is  the  final  and 
most  mysterious  outcome.  Thus,  the  foundation-gods, 
originally  killed  in  order  to  make  a  protecting  spirit  for  a 
house  or  a  tribal  god  for  a  city  or  vilage,  came  at  last  to  be 
regarded  as  victims  sacrificed  to  the  Earth  Goddess  or  to 
the  Earth  Demons;  and  thus,  too,  the  Meriahs  and  other 


320 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


II    i 


I 


>  '  .  '  I 


I!.'  / 


•/ 


agricultural  victims,  originally  killed  in  order  to  make  a 
corn-god  or  a  corn-spirit,  came  at  last  to  be  regarded  as 
sacrifices  to  the  Earth,  or  to  some  abstract  Dionysus  or 
Attis  or  Adonis.  And  since  in  the  last  case  at  least  the 
god  and  the  victim  were  still  called  by  the  same  name  and 
recognised  as  one,  there  grew  up  at  last  in  many  lands,  and 
in  both  hemispheres,  but  especially  in  the  Eastern  Mediter- 
ranean basin,  the  mystic  theory  of  the  sacrifice  of  a  god, 
himself  to  himself,  in  atonement  or  expiation,  which  forms 
the  basis  of  the  Christian  Plan  of  Salvation.  It  is  this  se- 
condary and  derivative  form  of  sacrifice,  I  believe,  which 
is  mainly  considered  in  Professor  Robertson  Smith's  ela- 
borate and  extremely  valuable  analysis. 

I  have  said  that  the  secondary  form  of  sacrifice,  which 
for  brevity's  sake  I  shall  henceforth  designate  as  the  mys- 
tic, is  found  in  most  parts  of  the  world  and  in  both  hemi- 
spheres.    This  naturally  raises  the  question  whether  it  has 
a  single  common  origin,  and  antedates  the  dispersal  of 
mankind  through  the  hemispheres  ;  or  whether  it  has  been 
independently  evolved  several  times  over  in  many  lands 
by  many  races.     For  myself,  I  have  no  cut-and-dried  an- 
swer to  this  abstruse  question,  nor  do  I  regard  it,  indeed, 
as  a  really  important  one.      On  the  one  hand,  there  are 
many  reasons  for  supposing  that  certain  relatively  high 
traits  of  thought  or  art  were  common  property  among 
mankind  before  the  dispersion  from  the  primitive  centre,  if 
a  primitive  centre  ever  existed.     On  the  other  hand,  psy- 
chologists know  well  that  the  human  mind  acts  with  ex- 
traordinary similarity  in  given  circumstances  all  the  world 
over,  and  that  identical  stages  of  evolution  seem  to  have 
been  passed  through  independently  by  many  races,  in 
Egypt  and  Mexico,  in  China  and  Peru  ;  so  that  we  can  find 
nothing  inherently  improbable  in  the  idea  that  even  these 
complex  conceptions  of  mystic  sacrifice  have  distinct  ori- 
gins in  remote  countries.     What  is  certain  is  the  fact  that 
among  the  Aztecs,  as  among  the  Phrygians,  the  priest  who 
sacrificed,  the  victim  he  slew,  and  the  image  or  great 


RELIGIOUS  CHARACTER  OF  THE  HERD. 


321 


/ 


eat 


god  to  whom  he  slew  him,  were  all  identified  ;  the  killer, 
the  killed,  and  the  b  Mng  in  whose  honor  the  killing  took 
place  were  all  one  single  indivisible  deity.  Even  such  de- 
tails as  that  the  priest  clothed  himself  in  the  skin  of  the 
victim  are  common  to  many  lands  ;  they  may  very  well  be 
either  a  heritage  from  remote  ancestral  humanity,  or  the 
separate  product  of  the  human  mind,  working  along  like 
grooves  under  identical  conditions.  In  one  word  they 
may  perhaps  be  necessary  and  inevitable  corollaries  from 
antecedent  conceptions. 

I  must  further  premise  that  no  religion  as  we  now  know 
it  is  by  any  means  primitive.  The  most  savage  creeds  we 
find  among  us  have  still  hundreds  of  thousand:,  of  years  be- 
hind them.  The  oldest  religions  whose  records  have  de- 
scended to  us,  like  those  of  Egypt  and  of  Assyria,  are  still 
remote  by  hundreds  of  thousands  of  years  from  the  prime 
original.  Cultivation  itself  is  a  very  ancient  and  immemorial 
art.  Few  savages,  even  among  those  who  are  commonly 
described  as  in  the  hunting  stage,  are  wholly  ignorant  of 
some  simple  form  of  seed-sowing  and  tillage.  The  few 
who  are  now  ignorant  of  those  arts  show  some  apparent 
signs  of  being  rather  degenerate  than  primitive  peoples. 
My  own  belief  or  suspicion  is  that  ideas  derived  from  the 
set  of  practices  in  connexion  with  agriculture  detailed  in 
the  last  two  chapters  have  deeply  coloured  the  life  and 
thought  of  almost  the  whole  human  race,  including  even 
those  rudest  tribes  which  now  know  little  or  nothing  of 
agriculture.  But  I  do  not  lay  stress  upon  this  half-formed 
conviction,  to  justify  which  would  lead  me  too  far  afield. 
I  shall  be  content  with  endeavouring  to  suggest  how  far 
they  have  coloured  the  ideas  of  the  greater  number  of  ex- 
isting nations. 

Early  pastoral  races  seldom  kill  a  beast  except  on  great  ,^^ 
occasions.     When  they  kill  it,  they  devour  it  in  common, 
all  the  tribe  being  invited  to  the  festival.     But  they  also  eat 
it  in  fellowship  with  their  gods  ;  every  great  feast  is  essen- 
tially a  Theoxenion,  a  Lectisternium,  a  banquet  in  which 


\\ 


i  h 


1.1 


r 


322 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMISXT, 


1|.. 


Ill 


i  'ill 


/ 


the  deities  participate  with  mortals.  It  is  this  sense  of  a 
common  feast  of  gods  and  men  which  gave,  no  doubt,  the 
first  step  towards  the  complex  idea  of  the  sacramental  meal 
— an  idea  still  further  developed  at  a  later  stage  by  the  ad- 
dition of  the  concept  that  the  worshipper  eats  and  drinks 
the  actual  divinity. 

My  own  belief  is  that  all  sacrificial  feasts  of  this  god- 
eating  character  most  probably  originated  in  actual  canni- 
balism ;  and  that  later  an  animal  victim  was  substituted  for 
the  human  meat  ;  but  I  do  not  insist  on  this  point,  nor  at- 
tempt, strictly  speaking,  to  prove  it.  It  is  hardly  more 
than  a  deeply  grounded  suspicion.  Nevertheless,  I  will 
begin  for  convenience'  sake  with  the  cannibal  class  of  sacri- 
fice, and  will  come  round  in  time  to  the  familiar  slaughter 
of  sheep  and  oxen,  which  in  many  cases  is  known  to  have 
supplanted  a  human  offering. 

Acosta's  account  of  the  Mexican  custom  is  perhaps  the 
best  instance  we  now  possess  of  the  ritual  of  cannibal  mys- 
tic sacrifice  in  its  fullest  barbarity.  "  They  took  a  captiv 
says  that  racy  old  author,  "  at  random;  and  before  sa 
ficing  him  to  their  idols,  they  gave  him  the  name  of  the 
idol  to  whom  he  should  be  sacrificed,  and  dressed  him  in 
the  same  ornaments,  identifying  him  with  the  god.  Dur- 
ing the  time  that  the  identification  lasted,  which  was  for  a 
year  in  some  feasts,  six  months  or  less  in  others,  they  re- 
verenced and  worshipped  him  in  the  same  manner  as  the 
idol  itself.  Meanwhile,  he  was  allowed  to  eat,  drink,  and 
make  merry.  When  he  went  through  the  streets,  the  peo- 
ple came  forth  to  worship  him  ;  and  every  one  brought 
alms,  with  children  and  sick  people  that  he  might  cure 
them  and  bless  them.  He  did  as  he  pleased  in  everything, 
except  that  he  had  ten  or  twelve  men  about  him,  to  pre- 
vent him  from  escaping.  In  order  that  he  might  be  reve- 
renced as  he  passed,  he  sometimes  sounded  upon  a  small 
flute,  to  tell  the  people  to  worship  him.  When  the  feast  ar- 
rived, and  he  had  grown  fat,  they  killed  him,  opened  him, 
and  making  a  solemn  sacrifice,  eat  him."     Then ,  in  the 


EATING  GOOD  QUALITIES. 


323 


re- 


ind 


rht 


)re- 

ive- 

lall 

lar- 

Ithe 


words  of  a  competent  authority,  we  have  the  simple  catmi- 
bal  feast  in  its  fullest  nakedness. 

I  need  hardly  point  out  how  much  this  account  recalls 
the  Khond  custom  of  the  Meriah.  The  victim,  though 
not  really  of  royal  blood,  is  made  artificially  into  a  divine 
king  ;  he  is  treated  with  all  the  honours  of  royalty  and 
godhead,  is  dressed  like  the  deity  with  whom  he  is  iden- 
tified, and  is  finally  killed  and  eaten.  Tb«»  last  point  alone 
differs  in  any  large  degree  from  the  case  of  the  Meriah. 
We  have  still  to  enquire,  "  Why  did  they  eat  him  ?  " 

The  answer  to  this  enquiry  takes  us  into  the  very  heart 
and  core  of  the  sacramental  concept. 

It  is  a  common  early  belief  that  to  eat  of  any  particular 
animal  gives  you  the  qualities  of  that  animal.  The  Miris 
of  Northern  India  prize  tiger's  flesh  for  men;  it  gives  them 
strength  and  courage;  but  women  must  not  eat  it;  'twould 
make  them  "  too  strong-minded."  The  Namaquas  abstain 
from  eating  hare;  they  would  become  faint-hearted  if  they 
swallowed  it  ;  but  they  eat  the  meat  of  the  lion  or  drink 
the  blood  of  the  leopard,  in  order  to  gain  their  strength 
and  courage.  Among  the  Dyaks,  young  men  and  war- 
riors must  not  eat  deer  ;  it  would  render  them  cowardly  ; 
but  women  and  very  old  men  are  allowed  to  eat  it.  Men 
of  the  Buro  and  Aru  Islands  feed  on  the  flesh  of  dogs  in 
order  to  be  bold  and  nimble.  Mr.  Frazer  has  collected  an 
immense  number  of  similar  instances,  which  show  both 
how  widespread  and  how  deep-seated  are  such  beliefs. 
Even  scrapings  of  the  bones  are  sufficient  to  produce  the 
desired  result  ;  in  Corea,  the  bones  of  tigers  fetch  a  higher 
price  than  those  of  leopards  as  inspirers  of  courage.  The 
heart  of  a  lion  is  also  particularly  good  for  this  purpose; 
and  the  tongues  of  birds  are  recommended  for  eloquence. 

Again,  on  the  same  analogy,  the  flesh  and  blood  of  brave 
men  are  eaten  in  order  to  inspire  bravery.  The  Australian 
Kamilaroi  eat  the  heart  and  liver  of  a  valiant  warrior  in 
order  to  acquire  his  courage.  The  Philippine  Islanders 
drink  the  blood  of  their  bravest  enemies.      In  the  Shire 


'1 


r. 


fi  s 


;J    r 


.4 


324 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


If  I 


'   rl 


Mi    i! 


. 


Hi    I 


Highlands  of  Africa,  those  who  kill  a  distinguished  fighter 
eat  his  heart  to  get  his  courage.  Du  Chaillu's  negro  atten- 
dants, we  saw,  scraped  their  ancestors'  skulls,  and  drank  the 
powder  in  water.  "  Our  ancestors  were  brave,"  said  they; 
"  and  by  drinking  their  skulls,  we  shall  be  brave  as  they 
were."  Here  again  I  can  only  refer  the  reader  for  nu- 
merous examples  to  Mr.  Frazer's  inexhaustible  storehouse. 

The  case  of  Du  Chaillu's  warriors,  however,  takes  us 
with  one  bound  into  the  heart  of  the  subject.  Many  sa- 
vages for  similar  reasons  actually  eat  their  own  dead  fa- 
thers.* We  learn  from  Strabo  that  the  ancient  Irish 
"  deemed  it  honourable  to  devour  the  bodies  of  their  pa- 
rents." So,  Herodotus  tells  us,  did  the  Issedones  of  Cen- 
tral Asia.  The  Massagetae  used  "  from  compassion  "  to 
club  and  eat  their  aged  people.  The  custom  was  quite. re- 
cently common  among  the  Battas  of  Sumatra,  who  used 
"  religiously  and  ceremonially  to  eat  their  old  relations." 
In  Australia,  it  was  usual  to  eat  relatives  who  died  by  mis- 
chance. Of  the  Cucumas  we  read  that  *'  as  soon  as  a  rela- 
tion died,  these  people  assembled  and  eat  him  roasted  or 
boiled,  according  as  he  was  thin  or  fat."  The  Tarianas 
and  Tucanas,  who  drink  the  ashes  of  their  relatives,  "  be- 
lieve that  thus  the  virtues  of  the  deceased  will  be  trans- 
mitted  to  the  drinkers."  The  Arawaks  think  it  the  high- 
est mark  of  honour  they  could  pay  to  the  dead  to  drink 
their  powdered  bones  mixed  in  water.  Generally  speak- 
ing, in  a  large  number  of  cases,  the  parents  or  relatives 
were  eaten  in  order  "  not  to  let  the  life  go  out  of  the  fami- 
ly ";  or  to  preserve  the  bodies  and  souls  in  a  kindred  body; 
or  to  gain  the  courage  and  other  qualities  of  the  dead  re- 
lation. In  short,  the  dead  were  eaten  sacramentally  or,  as 
one  writer  even  phrases  it,  "  eucharistically."  Mr.  Hart- 
land  has  collected  many  striking  instances. 

How  this  strange  custom  originates  we  may  guess  from 

"  '*  Since  this  chapter  was  written,  the  subject  of  honorific  cannibalism 
has  been  far  more  fully  treated  by  Mr.  Sidney  Hartland  in  the  chapter 
on  Funeral  Rites,  in  the  second  volume  of  7'he  Legend  of  Perseus. 


'  '    I 


EATING  THE  DEAD. 


325 


>» 


Irom 

ilism 
lapter 


Mr.  Wyatt  Gill's  description  of  a  New  Guinea  funeral. 
"  The  women  lacerated  their  faces  and  beat  their  breasts 
most  afifectingly,"  he  says  ;  "  and  then,  in  the  madness  of 
their  grief,  pressed  the  matter  out  of  the  wounded  thigh, 
and  smeared  it  over  their  facps  and  persons,  and  even  licked 
it  up."  Of  the  Koiari  corpses  he  says  :  "  A  fire  is  kept 
burning  day  and  night  at  the  head  and  feet  for  months. 
The  entire  skin  is  removed  by  means  of  the  thumb  and 
forefinger,  and  the  juices  plastered  all  over  the  face  and 
body  of  the  operator, — parent,  husband,  or  wife  of  the 
deceased.  The  fire  gradually  desiccates  the  flesh,  so  that 
little  more  than  the  skeleton  is  left."  This  naturally  leads 
on  to  eating  the  dead,  which  indeed  is  practised  elsewhere 
in  New  Guinea. 

But  if  men  eat  the  bodies  of  their  fathers,  who  are  their 
family  and  household  gods,  they  will  also  naturally  eat  the 
bodies  of  the  artificial  gods  of  cultivation,  or  of  the  tempo- 
rary kings  who  die  for  the  people.  By  eating  the  body  of 
a  god,  you  absorb  his  divinity  ;  he  and  you  become  one  ; 
he  is  in  you  and  inspires  you.  This  is  the  root-idea  of  sac- 
ramental practice  ;  you  eat  your  god  by  way  of  complete 
union  ;  you  subsume  him  in  yourself ;  you  and  he  are  one 
being.  , 

Still,  how  can  you  eat  your  god  if  you  also  bury  him  as 
a  corn-spirit  to  use  him  as  seed  ?  The  Gonds  supply  us 
with  the  answer  to  that  obvious  difficulty.  For,  as  we  saw, 
they  sprinkle  the  blood  of  the  victim  over  the  ploughed 
field  or  ripe  crop,  and  then  they  sacramentally  devour  his 
body.  Such  a  double  use  of  the  artificial  god  is  frequently 
to  be  detected,  indeed,  through  the  vague  words  of  our  au- 
thorities. We  see  it  in  the  Potraj  ceremony,  where  the 
blood  of  the  lamb  is  drunk  by  the  officiating  priest,  while 
the  remainder  of  the  animal  is  buried  beside  the  altar  ;  we 
see  it  in  the  numerous  cases  where  a  portion  of  the  victim 
is  eaten  sacramentally,  and  the  rest  burned  and  scattered 
over  the  fields,  which  it  is  supposed  to  fertilise.  You  eat 
your  god  in  part,  so  as  to  imbibe  his  divinity  ;  but  you 


/  V 


M' 


n 


\  I 


If' 


n 


nil- 


li!  ■ ,  :; 


!i 
1! 
,( 

i 
i 

i  'Tf^  "' 

326 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


bury  him  in  part,  so  as  to  secure  at  the  same  time  his  fer- 
tilising qualities  for  your  corn  or  your  vineyard. 

I  admit  that  all  this  is  distinctly  mystic  ;  but  mystery- 
mongering  and  strange  reduplication  of  persons,  with  mar- 
vellous identifications  and  minute  distinctions,  have  always 
formed  much  of  the  stock-in-trade  of  religion.  If  cults 
were  all  plain  sailing  throughout,  what  room  for  faith? — 
there  would  be  less  to  engage  the  imagination  of  the  vo- 
tary. 

And  now  let  us  return  awhile  to  our  Mexican  instances. 

At  the  annual  feast  of  the  great  god  Tezcatlipoca,  which, 
like  most  similar  festivals,  fell  about  the  same  time  as  the 
Cliristian  Easter,  a  young  man  was  chosen  to  be  the  repre- 
sentative of  the  god  for  a  twelvemonth.  As  in  the  case  of 
almost  all  chosen  victims,  he  had  to  be  a  person  of  unblem- 
ished body,  and  he  was  trained  to  behave  like  a  god-king 
with  becoming  dignity.  During  his  year  of  godship,  he 
was  lapped  in  luxury  ;  and  the  actual  reigning  emperor 
took  care  that  he  should  be  splendidly  attired,  regarding 
him  already  as  a  present  deity.  He  was  attended  by  eight 
pages  clad  in  the  royal  livery — which  shows  him  to  have 
been  a  king  as  well  as  a  god  ;  and  wherever  he  went  the 
people  bowed  down  to  him.  Twenty  days  before  the  fes- 
tival at  which  he  was  to  be  sacrificed,  four  noble  maidens, 
bearing  the  names  of  four  goddesses,  were  given  him  to  be 
his  brides.  The  final  feast  itself,  Hke  those  of  Dionysus, 
of  Attis,  and  of  Potraj,  occupied  five  days — a  coincidence 
between  the  two  hemispheres  which  almost  points  to  ori- 
ginal identity  of  custom  before  the  dispersion  of  the  races. 
During  these  five  days  the  real  king  remained  in  his  palace 
— and  this  circumstance  plainly  shows  that  the  victim  be- 
longed to  the  common  class  of  substituted  and  temporary 
divine  king-gods.  The  whole  court,  on  the  other  hand,  at- 
tended the  victim.  On  the  last  day  of  the  feast,  the  vic- 
tim was  ferried  across  the  lake  in  a  covered  barge  to  a  small 
temple  in  the  form  of  a  pyramid.  On  reaching  the  sum- 
mit, he  was  seized  and  held  down  on  a  block  of  stone, — no 


, '. 


GOD-EATING  IN  MEXICO. 


327 


doubt  an  altar  of  funereal  origin, — while  the  priest  cut  open 
his  breast  with  a  stone  knife,  and  plucked  his  heart  out. 
This  he  offered  to  the  god  of  the  sun.  The  head  was  hung 
up  among  the  skulls  of  previous  victims,  no  doubt  for 
oracular  purposes,  and  as  a  permanent  god  ;  but  the  legs 
and  arms  were  cooked  and  prepared  for  the  table  of  the 
lords,  who  thus  partook  of  the  god  sacramentally.  His 
place  was  immediately  filled  by  another  young  man,  who 
for  a  year  was  treated  with  the  same  respect,  and  at  the 
end  of  that  time  was  similarly  slaughtered. 

I  do  not  think  I  need  point  out  the  close  resemblance  of 
this  ritual  to  that  of  the  Khond  Meriah,  of  the  Potraj,  and 
of  the  festivals  of  Dionysus,  Osiris,  Attis,  and  Adonis. 
But  I  would  also  call  particular  attention  to  the  final  des- 
tination of  the  skull,  and  its  exact  equivalence  to  the  skull 
of  the  animal-god  in  India  and  elsewhere. 

"  The  idea  that  the  god  thus  slain  in  the  person  of  his 
representative  comes  to  life  again  immediately,"  says  Mr. 
Frazer,  "  was  graphically  represented  in  the  Mexican  ri- 
tual by  skinning  the  slain  man-god,  and  clothing  in  his  skin 
a  living  man,  who  thus  became  the  new  representative  of 
the  godhead."  For  example,  at  an  annual  festival  in  Mex- 
ico, a  woman  was  sacrificed  who  represented  Toci,  the 
Mother  of  the  Gods — a  sort  of  yearly  Mexican  Cybele. 
She  was  dressed  in  the  ornaments  and  bore  the  name  of  the 
goddess  of  whom  she  was  believed  to  be  an  incarnation. 
After  being  feasted  for  several  days,  she  was  taken  at  mid- 
night to  the  summit  of  a  temple,  and  there  beheaded.  Her 
body  was  flayed,  and  one  of  the  priests,  clothing  himself 
in  the  skin,  became  the  representative  of  the  goddess  Toci. 
The  skin  of  the  woman's  thigh,  however,  was  separately 
removed,  and  a  young  man  who  represented  the  god  Cin- 
teotl,  the  son  of  Toci,  wrapt  it  round  him  like  a  mask. 
Ceremonies  then  followed,  in  which  the  two  men,  clad  in 
the  woman's  skin,  enacted  the  parts  of  the  god  and  god- 
dess.    In  all  this,  there  is  much  that  seems  to  me  remi- 


hi 

I  it 


3r     ; 


[:«  i 


328 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


.  mi 


m 


11:- 


I 


i 


1^ 


niscent  of  Isis  and  Horus,  of  Cybele  and  Attis,  of  Semele 
and  Dionysus,  and  of  several  other  eastern  rituals. 

Still  more  significant  is  the  yearly  festival  of  the  god  To- 
tec,  who  was  represented  in  like  manner  by  a  priest,  clad  in 
the  skin  of  a  human  victim,  and  who  received  oflferings  of 
first-fruits  and  iirst-flowers,  together  with  bunches  of  maize 
which  had  been  kept  for  seed.  Here  we  have  the  closest 
possible  analogy  to  the  case  of  the  Meriah.  The  offering 
of  first-fruits,  made  sometimes  to  the  king,  sometimes  to 
the  ancestral  spirits,  is  here  made  to  the  human  god  of  cul- 
tivation, who  represents  both  in  his  own  person. 

Many  other  cannibal  sacrifices  are  recorded  in  Mexico  : 
in  more  than  one  of  them  it  was  customary  for  the  priest  to 
tear  out  the  warm  throbbing  heart  of  the  victim,  and  pre- 
sent it  to  the  idol.  Whether  these  sacrifices  in  each  par- 
ticular case  were  of  the  ordinary  or  of  the  mystic  type  it  is 
not  always  quite  easy  to  decide  ;  probably  the  worshippers 
themselves  did  not  accurately  discriminate  in  every  in- 
stance. But  however  that  may  be,  we  know  at  least  this 
much  :  when  human  sacrifices  had  been  rare,  the  priests  re- 
minded the  kings  that  the  gods  "  were  starving  with  hun- 
ger"; war  was  then  made  on  purpose  to  take  prisoners, 
"  because  the  gods  had  asked  for  something  to  eat  ";  and 
thousands  of  victims  were  thus  slaughtered  annually.  The 
blood  of  the  victims  was  separately  offered  ;  and  I  may 
add  in  this  connexion  that  as  a  rule  both  ghosts  and  gods 
are  rather  thirsty  than  hungry.  I  take  the  explanation  of 
this  peculiar  taste  to  be  that  blood  and  other  liquids 
poured  upon  the  ground  of  graves  or  at  altar-stones  soon 
sink  in,  and  so  seem  to  have  been  drunk  or  sucked  up  by 
the  ghost  or  god  ;  whereas  meat  and  solid  offerings  are 
seen  to  be  untouched  by  the  deity  to  whom  they  are  pre- 
sented. A  minor  trait  in  this  blood-loving  habit  of  the 
d^ods  is  seen  in  the  fact  that  the  Mexicans  also  gave  the 
god  to  drink  fresh  blood  drawn  from  their  own  ears,  and 
that  the  priests  likewise  drew  blood  from  their  legs,  and 
daubed  it  on  the  temples.     Similar  mitigations  of  self-im- 


>  I  I'i 


i 


PM 


rhe 


BLOOD  IS  ESSENTIAL. 


329 


molation  are  seen  elsewhere  in  the  Attis-priest  drawing 
blood  from  his  arms  for  Attis,  in  the  Hebrew  Baal-priests 
"  cutting  themselves  for  Baal,"  and  in  the  familiar  Hebrew 
rite  of  circumcision.  Blood  is  constantly  drawn  by  survi- 
vors or  worshippers  as  an  act  of  homage  to  the  dead  or  to 
deities. 

I  might  multiply  instances  of  human  sacrifices  of  the 
mystic  order  elsewhere,  but  I  prefer  to  pass  on  to  the  va- 
rious mitigations  which  they  tend  to  undergo  in  various 
communities.  In  its  fullest  form,  I  take  it,  the  mystic  sacri- 
fice ought  to  be  the  self-immolation  of  a  divine  priest-king, 
a  god  and  descendant  of  gods,  himself  to  himself,  on  the 
altar  of  his  own  divine  foundation-  ancestor.  But  in  most 
cases  which  we  can  trace,  the  sacrifice  has  already  assumed 
the  form  of  an  immolation  of  a  willing  victim,  a  temporary 
king,  of  the  divine  stock  only  by  adoption,  though  some- 
times a  son  or  brother  of  the  actual  monarch.  Further 
modifications  are  that  the  victim  becomes  a  captive  taken 
in  war  (which  indeed  is  implied  in  the  very  etymology  of 
the  Latin  word  victima),  or  a  condemned  criminal,  or  an 
imbecile,  who  can  be  more  readily  induced  to  undertake 
the  fatal  office.  Of  all  of  these  we  have  seen  hints  at  least 
in  previous  cases.  Still  more  mitigated  are  the  forms  in 
which  the  victim  is  allowed  to  escape  actual  death  by  a 
subterfuge,  and  those  in  which  an  image  or  effigy  is  al- 
lowed to  do  duty  for  the  living  person.  Of  these  interme- 
diates we  get  a  good  instance  in  the  case  of  the  Bhagats, 
mentioned  by  Col.  Dalton,  who  "  annually  make  an  image 
of  a  man  in  wood,  put  clothes  and  ornaments  on  it,  and 
present  it  before  the  altar  of  a  Mahadeo  "  (or  rude  stone 
phallic  idol).  "  The  person  who  officiates  as  priest  on  the 
occasion  says,  *  O,  Mahadeo,  we  sacrifice  this  man  to  you 
according  to  ancient  customs.  Give  us  rain  in  due  sea- 
son, and  a  plentiful  harvest.*  Then,  with  one  stroke  of  the 
axe,  the  head  of  the  image  is  struck  ofT,  and  the  body  is 
removed  and  buried."     This  strange  rite  shows  us  a  sur- 


:> 


I  lY 


'     i 


i,  '. 


;         1 

n 

■li 

i 

'  i 

)^ 


!!  f 


.  '..:...:■; 


330 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


viving  but  much  mitigated  form  of  the  Khond  Meriah 
practice. 

As  a  rule,  however,  such  bloodless  representations  do 
not  please  the  gods  ;  nor  do  they  succeed  in  really  libe- 
rating a  ghost  or  corn-god.  They  are  after  all  but  feeble 
phantom  sacrifices.  Blood  the  gods  want,  and  blood  is 
given  them.  The  most  common  substitute  for  the  human 
victim-god  is  therefore  the  animal  victim-god,  of  which  we 
have  already  seen  copious  examples  in  the  ox  and  kid  of 
Dionysus,  the  pig  of  Attis,  and  many  others.  It  seems 
probable  that  a  large  number  of  sacrifices,  if  not  the  ma- 
jority of  those  in  which  domestic  inimals  are  slain,  belong 
in  the  last  resort  to  the  same  category.  Thus,  indeed,  we 
can  most  easily  explain  the  theory  of  the  so-called  "  thean- 
thropic  "  victim, — the  animal  which  stands  for  a  man  and 
a  god, — as  well  as  the  point  of  view  of  sacrifice  so  ably 
elaborated  by  Dr.  Robertson  Smith. 

According  to  this  theory,  the  domestic  animals  were 
early  regarded  as  of  the  same  kin  or  blood  as  the  tribe  ; 
and  the  slaughter  of  an  ox,  a  goat,  or  a  sheep  could  only 
be  permitted  if  it  were  done,  like  the  slaughter  of  a  king's 
son,  sacrificially  and  sacramentally.  In  my  own  opinion, 
this  scarcely  means  more  than  that  the  sacred  domestic  an- 
imals were  early  accepted  as  substitutes  for  the  human 
victim,  and  that  they  were  eaten  sacrificially  and  sacra- 
mentally as  the  human  victim  was  also  eaten.  But  I  will 
waive  this  somewhat  controversial  point,  and  content  my- 
self with  suggesting  that  the  animal  victim  was  habitually 
treated  as  in  itself  divine,  and  that  its  blood  was  treated  in 
the  same  way  as  the  blood  of  the  original  cannibal  offering. 
At  the  same  time,  the  sacrifice  was  usually  offered  at  the 
altar  of  some  older  and,  so  to  speak,  more  constant  deity, 
while  the  blood  of  the  victim  was  allowed  to  flow  over  the 
sacred  stone.  Certainly,  both  among  the  Arabs  and  the  He- 
brews, all  slaughter  of  domestic  animals  appears  to  have 
been  at  one  time  sacrificial  ;  and  even  when  the  slaughter 
ceased  necessarily  to  involve  a  formal  sacrifice,  it  was  still 


!  i 


.». 


SACREDNESS  OF  THE  VICTIM. 


331 


thought  necessary  to  slay  the  victim  in  the  name  of  a  god, 
and  to  pour  out  the  blood  in  his  honour  on  the  ground. 
Even  in  the  Graeco-Roman  world,  the  mass  of  butcher's 
meat  was  "  meat  offered  to  idols."  We  shall  see  hereafter 
that  among  existing  savages  the  slaughter  of  domestic  ani- 
mals is  still  regarded  as  a  sacred  rite. 

1  believe  also  that  as  a  rule  the  blood-offering  is  the 
earliest  and  commonest  form  of  slaughter  to  the  gods  ;  and 
that  the  victim  in  the  earlier  stages  was  generally  consumed 
by  the  communicants,  as  we  know  the  cannibal  victim  to 
have  been  consumed  among  the  Mexicans,  and  as  we  saw 
the  theanthropic  goat  or  kid  was  orgiastically  devoured 
by  the  worshippers  of  Dionysus.  It  is  a  detail  whether  the 
sacred  victim  happened  to  be  eaten  raw  or  cooked  ;  the 
one  usage  prevailed  in  the  earlier  and  more  orgiastic 
rites,  the  other  in  the  milder  and  more  civilised  ceremo- 
nies. But  in  either  case,  the  animal-god,  like  the  human 
god,  was  eaten  sacramentally  by  all  his  worshippers,  who 
thus  took  into  themselves  his  divine  qualities.  The  prac- 
tice of  burning  the  victim,  on  the  other  hand,  prevailed 
mainly,  I  think,  among  cremationists,  like  the  Tyrians  and 
Hellenes,  though  it  undoubtedly  extended  also  to  many 
burying  peoples,  like  the  Hebrews  and  Egyptians.  In 
most  cases  even  of  cremated  victims,  it  would  appear,  a 
portion  at  least  of  the  animal  was  saved  from  the  fire  and 
sacramentally  eaten  by  the  worshippers. 

Once  more,  the  victim  itself  was  usually  a  particular 
kind  of  sacred  animal.  This  sacredness  of  the  chosen 
beast  has  some  more  important  bearings  than  we  have  yet 
considered.  For  among  various  pastoral  races,  various 
domesticated  animals  possess  in  themselves  positive  sanc- 
tity. We  know,  for  example,,  that  cows  are  very  holy  in 
the  greater  part  of  India,  and  buffaloes  in  the  Deccan. 
Among  the  African  peoples  of  the  pastoral  tribes,  the 
common  food  is  milk  and  game  ;  cattle  are  seldom  slaugh- 
tered merely  to  eat,  and  always  on  exceptional  or  sacred 
occasions — the  very  occasions  which  elsewhere  demand 


I- 

) : 


'    '!' 


'" 

FT 

Iriji^     : 

■ 

i 

r 

1 

t 

III 

li!   il! 


I".!   ! 


i  n 


■ 


! 


332 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


a  human  victim — such  as  the  proclamation  of  a  war,  a  re- 
ligious festival,  a  wedding,  or  the  funeral  of  a  great  chief- 
tain. In  such  cases,  the  feast  is  public,  all  blood-relations 
having  a  natural  right  to  attend.  The  cattle-kraal  itself  is 
extremely  sacred.  The  herd  and  its  members  are  treated 
by  their  masters  with  affectionate  and  almost  brotherly 
regard. 

A  few  further  points  must  also  be  added.  Among  early 
races,  to  kill  and  eat  wild  animals,  or  to  kill  and  eat  ene- 
mies, who  are  not  members  of  the  tribe,  is  not  accounted 
in  any  way  wrong.  But  to  kill  a  tribesman — to  shed  kin- 
dred blood — is  deeply  sinful;  and  so  it  is  sinful  to  kill  and 
eat  the  domestic  herds.  In  old  age,  indeed,  or  when  sick 
and  feeble,  you  may  kill  and  eat  your  blood-relation  blame- 
lessly; and  so  you  may  also  kill  and  eat  old  or  sickly  cattle. 
But  as  a  rule,  you  only  eat  them  sacramentally  and  sacri- 
ficially,  under  the  same  circumstances  where  you  would  be 
justified  in  killing  and  eating  a  human  victim.  Thus,  as  a 
rule,  each  tribe  has  its  own  sacred  beast,  which  is  employed 
as  a  regular  substitute  for  a  man-god.  Among  the  Arabs, 
this  beast  was  a  camel  ;  among  the  Indian  peoples,  the  bull 
or  the  buffalo  ;  among  shepherd  races,  it  is  the  sheep  or 
goat;  among  the  Teutons,  the  horse;  among  many  settled 
urban  peoples,  the  pig;  and  with  the  Samoyeds  and  Os- 
tiaks,  their  one  chattel,  the  reindeer. 

Also,  as  a  rule,  the  cow  or  other  female  animal  was  not 
usually  sacrificed;  she  was  kept  for  milk-yielding.  It  was 
the  bull,  the  ram,  the  ox,  the  he-goat  that  was  oftenest 
offered  and  eaten  sacramentally.  Mere  utilitarian  consi- 
derations would  soon  lead  to  this  use,  just  as  our  own 
butchers  kill  ram  lambs  by  choice,  and  spare  the  ewes  for 
breeding.  The  custom,  once  introduced,  would  tend  to 
become  sacred  ;  for  whatever  our  divine  ancestors  did  is 
itself  divine,  and  should  not  be  lightly  or  carelessly  altered. 
Hence  we  can  understand  that  supreme  sanctity  of  the 
cow,  which  has  made  so  many  races  refuse  to  sacrifice  it, 
while  they  sacrifice  and  eat  the  bull  or  ox  without  let  or 


THE  ARAB  CAMEL-SACRIFICE. 


333 


^as 


isi- 


Ifor 

to 

is 

fed. 

the 
it, 
or 


scruple.  Thus  the  Todas  have  never  eaten  the  flesh  of  the 
female  buffalo  ;  but  the  male  they  eat  once  a  year,  sacra- 
mentally,  all  the  adult  men  in  the  village  joining  in  the 
ceremony  of  killing  and  roasting  it. 

A  remarkable  instance  of  the  theanthropic  sacrifice  of 
such  a  sacred  animal  is  given  us  in  Nilus's  account  of  the 
ceremony  performed  by  the  Arabs  of  his  time.      A  holy 
camel,  chosen  as  a  victim,  was  bound  upon  a  rude  cairn  of 
piled-up  stones.     In  this  primitive  altar  we  can  hardly  fail 
to  recognise  the  grave  of  an  early  tribal  chieftain.     The 
leader  of  the  band  then  led  the  worshippers  thrice  round 
the  cairn  in  a  solemn  procession,  chanting  a  solemn  hymn 
as  they  went.     As  the  last  words  of  the  hymn  were  sung, 
he  fell  upon  the  camel  (like  Potraj  on  the  lamb),  wounded 
it,  and  hastily  drank  of  the  blood  that  gushed  out  from 
it.     Forthwith  the  whole  company  fell  on  the  victim  with 
their  swords,  hacked  off  pieces  of  the  quivering  flesh,  and 
devoured  them  raw  with  such  wild  haste  that  between  the 
rise  of  the  day-star  and  that  of  the  sun,  the  entire  camel, 
body  and  bones,  skin,  blood,  and  entrails,  was  absolutely 
eaten.     I  need  not  point  out  the  close  resemblance  of  this 
savage  rite  to  those  of  Potraj  and  of  Dionysus.      It  is  a 
point,  however,  to  observe  that  here  also  the  blood  falls 
on  the  cairn  or  grave  or  altar.     I  may  note  that  the  annual 
sacrifice  of  the  paschal  lamb  among  the  shepherd  Hebrews 
is  obviously  a  mere  mitigation  of  this  barbarous  rite.     In 
that  case,  as  might  be  expected  in  a  more  civiHsed  race, 
the  victim  is  roasted  whole  :  but  it  is  similarly  necessary 
that  every  part  of  it  should  be  hastily  eaten.     Legend  fur- 
ther informs  us,  in  the  instance  of  the  Passover,  that  the 
lamb  was  a  substitute  for  a  hum.an  victim,  and  that  the 
first-born  were  sanctified  to  Jahweh,  instead  of  being  sa- 
crificed.      Note  also  that  the  feast  of  the  paschal  lamb 
occupied  the  now  familiar  space  of  five  days  :  the  sacred 
animal  was  chosen  on  the  tenth  day  of  the  month,  and 
sacrificed  on  the  fourteenth.    The  whole  ceremonial  is 
most  illustrative  and  full  of  survivals. 


>    ! 


. 


334 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


I 


f^\ 


-M 


!|ii 


fi  ' " 


*,''  n'ivi 


■'■ 


■  i  I 


Though  it  breaks  for  a  moment  the  thread  of  my  argu- 
ment, I  find  it  impossible  not  to  mention  here  the  curious 
parallel  case  of  the  judicial  sacrifice  among  the  Battas  of 
Sumatra,  which  is  the  human  analogue  of  the  Arabian 
camel-sacrament.  Only  in  this  instance,  as  in  so  many 
others,  sacrifice  and  punishment  merge  into  one  another. 
"  With  them  the  adulterer,  the  night-thief,  and  those  who 
had  treacherously  attacked  a  town,  a  village,  or  a  particu- 
lar person,  were  condemned  to  be  eaten  by  the  people. 
They  were  tied  to  three  posts  ;  their  legs  and  their  arms 
were  stretched  out  in  the  shape  of  a  St.  Andrew's  cross; and 
then,  when  a  signal  was  given,  the  populace  rushed  upon 
the  body  and  cut  it  into  fragments  with  hatchets  or  with 
knives,  or  perhaps  more  simply  with  their  nails  and  their 
teeth.  The  strips  so  torn  ofT  were  devoured  instantly,  all 
raw  and  bloody;  they  were  merely  dipped  into  a  cocoanut 
bowl  containing  a  sauce  prepared  beforehand  of  lemon- 
juice  and  salt.  In  the  case  of  adultery,  the  outraged  hus- 
band had  the  right  of  choosing  first  what  piece  he  liked 
best.  The  guests  invited  to  the  feast  performed  this  work 
with  so  much  ardour  that  they  often  tore  and  hurt  each 
other."  I  do  not  think  we  can  read  this  account  without 
being  struck  by  its  close  analogy  to  many  of  our  previous 
sacrifices,  both  of  human  corn-gods  and  of  sacred  animals. 
The  criminal  is  here  nothing  more  than  the  substitute  for  a 
holy  human  victim. 

And  now  we  must  also  remember  that  in  most  countries 
the  gods  were  housemates  of  their  worshippers,  present  at 
all  times  in  every  home,  and  partakers  of  every  meal,  side 
by  side  with  the  living.  They  lived  in  the  house,  as  still  in 
New  Guinea.  Libations  to  them  were  poured  from  every 
cup;  food  was  offered  to  their  ghosts  or  skulls  or  wooden 
images  at  every  family  gathering.  The  ordinary  feasts 
were  thus  mere  enlarged  festal  gatherings,  at  which  a  vic- 
tim was  sacrificially  slain  and  sacramentally  eaten  ;  and 
the  visitors  believed  they  were  eating  the  body  and  blood 
of  the  god  to  their  own  salvation.     Greater  sacrifices,  like 


; 


RENEWAL  OF  THE  DIVINE  LIFE. 


335 


the  hecatombs,  or  the  heroic  Indian  horse-sacrifice,  must 
have  been  relatively  rare  ;  but  in  all  of  them  we  see  clear 
proof  that  the  victim  was  regarded  as  a  sacred  animal,  that 
is  to  say  a  god,  in  one  of  his  embodiments. 

Clear  evidence  of  this  equivalence  is  seen  in  the  fact  that 
the  worshippers  often  clad  themselves  in  the  skin  of  the 
victim,  as  the  Mexicans  did  in  the  skin  of  the  annual  god. 
Sometimes  the  hide  is  even  used  to  deck  the  idol.  In  the 
Cyprian  sacrifice  of  a  sheep  to  the  sheep-goddess  Aphro- 
dite, the  celebrants  wore  the  skin  of  the  sheep  ;  while  the 
Assyrian  Dagon-worshipper  offered  the  fish-sacrifice  to  the 
fish-god,  clad  in  a  fish-skin.  Of  similar  import  is  doubt- 
less the  aegis  or  goat-skin  of  Athena,  envisaged  as  a  goat- 
goddess,  and  the  skins  used  in  the  Dionysiac  mysteries.  I 
do  not  hesitate  to  aflfiliate  all  these  on  a  primitive  usage 
like  that  of  the  Mexican  cannibal  sacrifice. 

Having  reached  this  point,  we  can  see  further  that  the 
case  where  a  sacred  animal,  the  representative  of  a  human 
victim,  is  slaughtered  before  the  altar  of  an  older  god  is 
exactly  equivalent  to  the  other  known  case  where  a  human 
victim  is  slaughtered  before  the  foundation-stone  of  a  town 
or  village.  In  either  case,  there  is  a  distinct  renewal  of 
the  divine  life;  fresh  blood,  as  it  were,  is  instilled  by  the 
act  into  the  ancient  deity.  All  the  other  concomitants  are 
precisely  the  same.  Thus  at  the  Theban  sacrifice  of  a  ram 
to  the  ram-god  Amen,  the  worshippers  bewailed  the  vic- 
tim, as  the  women  bewailed  Adonis  and  Attis  ;  and  the 
image  of  Amen  was  finally  draped  in  the  skin  of  the  victim, 
while  its  body  was  buried  in  a  sacred  coffin.  At  the  Bu- 
phonia  or  sacramental  ox-slaying  in  Athens,  there  was  a 
regular  trial  after  the  victim  was  slain,  everybody  throwing 
the  blame  on  one  another,  till  at  last  the  knife  that  inflicted 
the  wound  was  found  guilty  of  murder  and  cast  into  the 
sea.  (This  casting  into  the  sea  of  a  guilt-bearer  for  the 
community  will  meet  us  again  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  doctrine  of  the  atonement.)  So  we  saw  that  the  Po- 
traj  fled  after  the  performance  of  his  sanguinary  sacrifice  ; 


[     1 

1 

i 

1      1  ■ 

1 

1 

,1 

m 


i '  i.i 


M'      •;•■! 


336 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


and  so  too  the  slayer  of  the  Dionysus-calf  at  Tenedos 
fled  for  his  life  when  the  ceremony  was  completed.  In- 
deed, we  get  many  intermediate  cases,  like  that  of  the  goat 
dressed  up  as  a  girl  which  was  offered  theanthropically  to 
Artemis  Munychia,  or  that  of  the  Dionysus-calf  clad  in 
buskins,  whose  mother-cow  was  treated  as  a  woman  in 
child-birth.  To  me,  all  these  instances  are  obvious  at- 
tempts to  palm  off,  as  it  were,  on  the  gods  a  sacred  animal 
in  place  of  a  genuine  human  victim.  They  are  little  more 
than  divine  legal  fictions,  eked  out,  no  doubt,  by  the  fic- 
tion of  kinship  between  the  herd  and  its  masters. 

As  a  whole,  then,  we  may  venture  to  say  not  perhaps 
that  all,  but  that  a  great  number  of  sacrifices,  and  certainly 
the  best-known  among  historic  nations,  are  slaughters 
of  animal  substitutes  for  human  victims  ;  and  that  the  flesh 
is  sacramentally  consumed  by  the  worshippers. 

There  is  one  special  form  of  this  animal  sacrifice,  how- 
ever, which  I  cannot  here  pass  over  in  complete  silence. 
It  is  the  one  of  which  the  harvest-feast  is  the  final  relic. 
Mr.  Frazer  has  fully  worked  out  this  dieme  in  his  fascina- 
ting essay:  to  detail  it  here  at  length  would  occupy  too 
much  space  ;  I  can  only  give  the  barest  outline  01  his  in- 
stances. C  i  iginally,  it  woulvl  seem,  the  corn-god  or  corn- 
spirit  was  conceived  during  tlu.'  re'xpi'^r)^  as  taking  refuge  in 
the  last  sheaf  left  standing.  Whoever  cut  that  wisp 
of  corn  slew  the  corn-spirit,  and  was  therefore,  on  the 
analogy  of  the  slayer  of  the  divine  king,  himself  the 
corn-spirit.  Mr.  Frazer  does  not  absolutely  assert  that 
this  human  representative  was  originally  killed  and  eaten, 
though  all  analogy  would  seem  to  suggest  it  ;  but  that  he 
was  at  least  killed  is  abundantly  certain  ;  and  killed  he 
still  is,  in  dumb  show  at  any  rate,  on  many  modern  Euro- 
pean corn-fields.  More  often,  however,  the  corit  spir't  is 
supposed  to  be  embodied  in  any  animal  wliich  happens  to 
be  found  in  the  last  sheaf,  where  even  now  small  creatures 
I'!-e  mice  and  hedgehogs  often  take  refuge.  In  earlier 
times,  however,  wolves,  wild  boars,  and  other  large  ani- 


THE  GOD  AS  BREAD  AND   H'INE. 


337 


H 


nials  seem  to  have  been  frequently  met  with  under  similar 
circumstances.  However  that  may  be,  a  great  many 
beasts — generally  sacred  beasts — are  or  have  been  sacra- 
nientally  eaten  as  representatives  of  the  corn-god  ;  while, 
conversely,  the  last  sheaf  is  often  made  up  into  the  image 
of  a  man  or  still  more  often  of  a  woman,  and  preserved  re- 
ligiously for  a  year,  like  the  annual  king,  till  the  next  har- 
vest. Sometimes  a  cock  is  beheaded  and  eaten  at  the  har- 
vest feast,  special  importance  being  here  attached  to  its 
head,  as  to  the  head  of  the  human  victim  in  so  many  other 
cases.  Sometimes,  as  with  the  ancient  Prussians,  it  was 
the  corn-goat  whose  body  was  sacramentally  eaten. 
Sometimes,  as  at  Chambery,  an  ox  is  slaughtered,  and 
eaten  with  special  rites  by  the  reapers  at  supper.  Some- 
times, it  is  the  old  sacred  Teutonic  animal,  the  horse,  that 
is  believed  to  inhabit  the  last  wisp  of  corn.  I  will  add  pa- 
renthetically here  (what  I  trust  in  some  future  work  to 
show)  that  we  have  probably  in  this  and  kindred  ideas  the 
origin  of  the  sacred  and  oracular  heads  of  horses  and  oxen 
attached  to  temples  or  built  into  churches.  Sometimes, 
again,  it  is  a  pig  that  represents  the  god,  and  is  ceremo- 
nially eaten  at  the  harvest  festival. 

I  need  hardly  mention  that  all  these  sacred  animals, 
substitutes  for  the  original  human  god,  find  their  parallels 
in  the  festivals  of  Dionysus,  Attis,  Osiris,  Demeter,  Adonis, 
Lityerses,  and  the  other  great  corn  and  wine  gods  of  the 
historic  civilisations. 

But  there  is  yet  another  and  more  sublimated  form  of 
sacramental  feast.  Since  the  corn-god  and  the  wine-god, 
when  slain,  undergo  resurrection  in  the  corn  and  the  vine, 
may  we  not  also  eat  their  bodies  as  bread,  and  drink  their 
blood  as  wine  or  soma? 

To  people  already  familiar,  first  with  the  honorific  can- 
nibal form  of  god-eating,  and  then  with  its  gentler  animal- 
victim  modification,  nothing  could  be  more  natural  than 
this  slight  transference  of  feeling.  Nay,  more  :  whoever 
€at  bread  and  drank  wine  from  the  beginning  must  have 


I   I 


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«ii* 

' 

■'  'if 

338 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


\    I 


■  '^i 


',    /    ■  i;   :li', 


known  it  was  the  body  and  blood  of  a  god  he  was  eating- 
and  drinking.  Still,  there  is  a  certain  difference  between 
mere  ordinary  every-day  food  and  the  sacramental  feast,  to 
which  sacred  cannibalism  and  animal -sacrifice  had  now  fa- 
miliarised men's  minds.  Accordingly,  we  find  in  many 
cases  that  there  exists  a  special  sacramental  eating  and 
drinking  of  bread  and  wine,  which  is  more  especially  re- 
garded as  eating  the  body  and  drinking  the  blood  of  the 
deity. 

Some  curious  illustrative  facts  may  here  be  cited.  Since 
straw  and  corn  grow  from  the  slaughtered  corn-god,  they 
may  be  regarded  as  one  of  his  natural  embodiments. 
Hence,  when  human  sacrifices  are  prohibited,  people  some- 
times make  a  straw  god  do  duty  for  a  human  one.  The 
Gonds,  we  :aw,  used  once  to  kidnap  sacred  Brahman 
boys — gods  by  race,  as  it  were,  yet  strangers  and  children 
— scatter  their  blood  over  the  fields,  and  eat  their  bodies 
sacramentally.  But  when  the  unsympathetic  British  gov- 
ernment interfered  with  the  god-making  habits  of  the 
Gond  people,  they  took,  says  Col.  Dalton,  to  making  an 
image  of  straw  instead,  which  they  now  similarly  sacrifice. 
So  it  may  be  noted  in  many  of  the  ceremonies  of  "  Burying 
the  Carnival  "  and  the  like,  which  I  have  already  cited,  that 
a  straw  man  is  substituted  symbolically  for  the  human  vic- 
tim. Indeed,  in  that  singular  set  of  survivals  we  have 
every  possible  substitute — the  mock  king,  the  imbecile, 
the  pretended  killing,  the  ceremonial  shedding  of  blood, 
th(;  animal  victim,  and  the  straw  man  or  effigy.  I  may  add 
that  even  the  making  of  our  modern  Guy  Fawkes  as  "  a 
man  of  straw  "  is  thus  no  mere  accident.  But  we  get  a 
very  similar  use  of  corn  in  the  curious  practice  of  fashion- 
ing the  corn-wife  and  the  corn-baby,  so  fully  detailed  by 
Mr.  Frazer.  In  this  attenuated  survival  of  human  sacri- 
fice, a  sheaf  of  corn  does  duty  for  a  human  victim,  and  rep- 
resents the  life  of  the  corn-god  or  corn-spirit  from  one  year 
to  another.  All  the  existing  evidence  goes  to  suggest  the 
idea  that  at  harvest  a  corn-maiden  or  corn-wife,  after  a 


EATING  THE  GOD. 


339 


year  of  deification,  was  slain  in  former  times,  and  that  the 
human  victim  is  now  represented  by  her  vegetable  ana- 
logue or  equivalent,  the  corn  in  the  ear,  a  sheaf  of  which 
does  duty  in  her  place,  and  reigns  as  corn-queen  till  the 
next  year's  harvest.     The  corn-baby  is  thus  a  temporary 
queen,  made  of  corn,  not  of  human  flesh  and  blood.     We 
may  compare  with  this  case  the  account  of  the  Sioux  girl 
who  was  sacrificed  by  the  Pawnees,  by  being  burned  over  a 
slow  fire,  and  then  shot  (like  St.  Sebastian)  with  arrows. 
The  chief  sacrificer  tore  out  her  heart  and  devoured  it,  thus 
eating  the  goddess  in  true  cannibal  fashion.     While  her 
flesh  was  still  warm,  it  was  cut  up  into  small  pieces  and 
taken  to  the  corn-field.     Drops  of  blood  were  squeezed 
from  it  upon  the  grains  of  seed-corn  ;  after  which  it  was  all 
covered  up  in  the  ground  to  form  a  crop-raiser.     Of  such 
a  ghastly  goddess-making  ceremony,  our  seemingly  inno- 
cent harvest  comedy  of  the  corn-baby  is  probably  the  last 
surviving  relic.     Mr.  Frazer  rightly  connects  it  with  the 
cult  of  the  Athenian  Kore,  Persephone.     I  think,  indeed,, 
the  double  form  of  the  name,  "  the  Old  Woman  "  and  "  the 
Corn-baby,"  makes  it  probable  that  the  pair  are  the  vege- 
table  equivalents    of   both    Demeter   and    her   ravished 
daughter. 

In  other  cases,  however,  it  is  the  actual  bread  and  wine 
themselves,  not  the  straw  or  the  corn  in  the  ear,  that  repre- 
sent the  god  and  are  sacramentally  eaten.  We  owe  to 
Mr.  Frazer  most  of  our  existing  knowledge  of  the  wide 
prevalence  and  religious  importance  of  this  singular  ritual. 

We  have  seen  already  that  in  many  countries  the  first- 
fruits  of  the  crops  are  presented  either  to  ancestral  ghosts, 
or  to  the  great  gods,  or  else  to  the  king,  who  is  the  living 
god  and  present  representative  of  the  divine  ancestors. 
Till  this  is  done,  it  would  be  unsafe  to  eat  of  the  new  har- 
vest. The  god  within  it  would  kill  you.  But  in  addition 
to  the  ceremonial  offering  of  first-fruits  to  the  spirits,  many 
races  also  "  eat  the  god  "  in  the  new  corn  or  rice  sacra- 
mentally.      In  Wermland,  in  Sweden,  the  farmer's  wife 


'  "i 


f   't 


340 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


uses  the  grain  of  the  last  sheaf  (in  which,  as  we  saw,  the 
corn-god  or  corn-spirit  is  supposed  specially  to  reside),  in 
order  to  bake  a  loaf  in  the  shape  of  a  little  girl.  Here  we 
have  the  maiden,  who  was  previously  sacrificed  as  a  corn- 
goddess  or  Persephone,  reappearing  once  more  in  a  bread 
image.  This  loaf  is  divided  among  all  the  household  and 
eaten  by  them.  So  at  La  Palisse  in  France,  a  man  made 
of  dough  is  hung  upon  the  fir-tree  which  is  carried  home 
to  the  granary  on  the  last  harvest-waggon.  The  dough 
man  and  the  tree  are  taken  to  the  mayor's  house  till  the 
vintage  is  over  ;  then  a  feast  takes  place,  at  which  the 
mayor  breaks  the  dough  man  in  pieces,  and  gives  the  frag- 
ments to  the  people  to  eat.  Here,  the  mayor  clearly 
represents  the  king  or  chief,  while  the  feast  of  first-fruits 
and  the  sacramental  eating  are  combined,  as  was  perhaps 
originally  the  case,  in  one  and  the  same  sacrificial  cere- 
mony. No  particular  mention  is  made  of  wine  ;  but  as 
the  feast  is  deferred  so  as  to  take  place  after  the  vintage,  it 
is  probable  that  the  blood  of  the  wine-god  as  well  as  the 
body  of  the  corn-god  entered  once  at  least  into  the  primi- 
tive ritual. 

Many  similar  feasts  survive  in  Europe  ;  but  for  the  rite 
of  eating  the  corn-god  in  its  fullest  form  we  must  go  once 
more  to  Mexico,  which  also  supplied  us  with  the  best  and 
most  thoroughly  characteristic  examples  of  the  cannibal 
god-eating.  Twice  a  year,  in  May  and  December,  an 
iniage  of  the  great  Mexican  god  Huitzilopochtli  was  made 
of  dough,  then  broken  in  pieces,  and  solemnly  eaten  by  his 
assembled  worshippers.  Two  days  before  the  May  feast, 
says  Acosta,  the  virgins  of  the  temple  kneaded  beet-seeds 
with  roasted  maize,  and  moulded  them  with  honey  into  a 
paste  idol,  as  big  as  the  permanent  wooden  idol  which 
represented  the  god,  putting  in  glass  beads  for  eyes,  and 
grains  of  Indian  corn  in  the  place  of  teeth.  The  nobles 
then  brought  the  vegetable  god  an  exquisite  and  rich  gar- 
ment, like  that  worn  by  the  wooden  idol,  and  dressed  the 
image  up  in  it.     This  done,  the  carried  the  effigy  on  a 


tM 


THE  MEXICAN  EUCHARIST. 


341 


litter  on  their  shoulders,  no  doubt  to  mark  its  royal  au- 
thority. On  the  morning  of  the  feast,  the  virgins  of  the 
god  dressed  themselves  in  garlands  of  maize  ard  other  fes- 
tal attire.  Young  men,  similarly  caparisoned,  carried  the 
image  in  its  ark  or  litter  to  the  foot  of  the  great  pyramid 
temple.  It  was  drawn  up  the  steps  with  clanging  music 
of  fiUtes  and  trumpets — a  common  accompaniment  of 
god-slaying  ceremonies.  Flowers  were  strewed  on  it,  as 
was  usual  with  all  the  gods  of  vegetation,  and  it  was  lodged 
in  a  little  chapel  of  roses.  Certain  ceremonies  of  singing 
and  dancing  then  took  place,  by  means  of  which  the  paste 
was  consecrated  into  the  actual  body  and  bones  of  the  god. 
Finally,  the  image  was  broken  up  and  distributed  to  the 
people,  first  the  nobles,  and  then  the  commonalty,  who  re- 
ceived it,  men,  women,  and  children,  "  with  such  tears, 
fear,  and  reverence  as  if  it  were  sacred,  saying  they  did  eat 
the  flesh  and  bones  of  God,  wherewith  they  were  grieved." 
I  need  not  point  out  the  close  resemblance  here  to  the 
mourning  over  the  bodies  of  Attis  and  Adonis,  nor  to  the 
rites  of  Dionysus. 

Still  more  closely  does  the  December  feast  (which  took 
place,  like  Christmas,  at  the  winter  solstice)  recall  the  can- 
nibal practice  ;  for  here  an  image  of  the  god  was  made  of 
seeds,  kneaded  into  dough  with  the  blood  of  children. 
Such  a  Massacre  of  the  Innocents  occurs  often  elsewhere 
in  similar  connexions  :  we  shall  meet  with  it  again  on  a 
subsequent  ot  asion.  The  image  was  placed  on  the  chief 
altar  of  the  temple,  and  on  the  day  of  its  Epiphany,  the 
king  of  Mexico  offered  incense  to  it.  Bambino  gods  like 
this  are  well  known  in  other  countries.  Next  day  it  was 
taken  down,  and  a  priest  flung  at  it  a  flint-tipped  arrow. 
This  was  called  "  killing  the  god  so  that  bis  body  might 
be  eaten."  One  of  the  priests  then  cut  out  the  heart  of 
the  image  and  gave  it  to  the  actual  king  to  eat,  just  as  in 
other  sacrifices  the  priest  cut  out  the  throbbing  heart  of 
the  human  victim  and  placed  it  in  the  mouth  of  the  canni- 
bal god.     The  rest  of  the  image  was  divided  into  small 


www 


<J  u 


342 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


'i    <\ 


w 


pieces,  which  were  distributed  to  all  the  males  of  the  com- 
munity, adults  or  children.  The  ceremony  was  called 
"  God  is  Eaten." 

I  will  not  multiply  examples  of  the  main  principle  of 
eating  the  corn-god  in  the  shape  of  little  cakes  or  human 
images,  which  have  been  collected  in  abundance  all  the 
world  over.  Mr.  Frazer's  work  is  a  perfect  thesaurus  of 
analogous  customs.  I  will  rather  call  attention  to  one 
or  two  special  parallels  with  similar  god-eating  rites,  canni- 
bal or  animal,  which  occur  elsewhere.  At  the  close  of  the 
rice  harvest  in  Boeroe,  in  the  East  Indies,  each  clan  meets 
at  a  common  sacrificial  meal,  to  which  every  member  of 
the  clan  is  bound  to  contribute  a  little  of  his  new  rice  from 
the  current  season.  This  is  called  "  eating  the  soul  of  the 
rice."  But  some  of  the  rice  is  also  set  apart  and  offered 
to  the  spirits — that  is,  I  take  it,  to  the  ghosts  of  ancestors. 
This  combination  is  like  the  common  case  of  the  human 
victim  being  offered  on  the  altar-stone  of  earlier  ancestral 
deities.  Amongst  the  Alfoers  of  Celebes,  again,  it  is  the 
priest  who  sows  the  first  rice-seeds,  and  plucks  the  first 
ripe  rice  in  each  field.  This  he  roasts  and  grinds  into 
meal,  giving  some  of  it  to  each  member  of  the  family. 
Here  the  priest  no  doubt  represents  the  old  tribal  priest- 
king.  Several  similar  practices  are  reported  from  India, 
only  one  of  which  need  at  present  detain  us.  Among  the 
Hindoos  of  the  Deccan  there  is  a  magical  and  sacramental 
eating  of  the  new  rice;  but  the  special  point  of  interest  to 
be  noted  here  is  the  fact  that  some  of  it  is  oflFered  to  the 
god  Ganesa,  after  which  the  whole  family  partake  of  the 
produce.  Among  the  Kafirs  of  Natal  and  Zululand,  how- 
ever, it  is  at  the  king's  kraal  that  the  people  assemble  for 
their  sacrameiital  feast  of  new  fruits,  where  they  dance  and 
perform  certain  sacred  ceremonies.  In  this  case,  the  king, 
the  living  god,  seems  to  take  the  place  of  the  god,  the  dead 
king,  in  the  Indian  festival.  A'arious  grains  are  mixed 
with  the  flesh  of  a  sacrificed  animal,  in  whom  we  shall  now 
have  perhaps  little  difficulty  in  recognising  the  representa- 


SACRAMENTAL  CAKES. 


343 


tive  of  a  human  corn-god  victim  ;  and  a  portion  of  this 
mess  is  placed  in  the  mouth  of  each  man  by  the  king  him- 
self, here  ofificiating  in  his  capacity  of  ancestral  priest. 
By  the  light  of  such  analogies,  I  think  we  need  have  no 
hesitation  in  reconstructing  the  primitive  sacramental 
feast,  where  a  man  was  sacrificed  as  an  annual  manufac- 
tured corn-god  ;  seeds  were  mixed  with  his  blood  ;  his 
flesh  was  eaten  sacramentally  by  the  people,  fed  by  the 
king;  a  part  of  his  body  was  also  eaten  by  the  king  him- 
self, and  a  part  was  offered  to  the  great  gods,  or  to  the 
tribal  god,  or  the  foundation  god  or  goddess  of  the  vil- 
lage or  city.  After  putting  together  the  various  survivals 
already  cited,  I  do  not  think  this  is  too  large  an  exercise  of 
the  constructive  faculty. 

An  interesting  mixed  case  of  god-eating,  in  which  the 
cake  was  baked,  not  in  the  form  of  a  man,  but  of  a  divine 
animal,  I  have  seen  myself  in  the  house  of  Irish  emigrants 
in  Canada.  The  new  corn  was  there  made  into  loaves  or 
buns  in  the  shape  of  little  pigs,  with  currants  for  eyes  ;  and 
one  of  these  was  given  to  each  of  the  children.  Though 
merely  regarded  as  a  playful  custom,  this  instance,  I  ven- 
ture to  think,  has  still  its  own  illustrative  value. 

The  practice  of  kneading  sacramental  cakes  from  the 
blood  of  infants,  which  we  saw  to  prevail  in  the  case  of  a 
Mexican  god,  is  parallelled  in  the  practice  of  mixing  them 
with  shreds  of  the  flesh  from  an  animal  victim  in  the  Zulu 
ceremony.  The  cannibal  form  of  the  rite  must,  however, 
have  been  very  widespread  ;  as  we  gather  from  the  fact 
that  a  Christian  sect,  the  Paulicians,  were  accused  of  it  as 
late  as  the  eighth  century.  John  of  Osun,  Patriarch  of 
Armenia,  wrote  a  diatribe  against  these  sectaries,  in  which 
he  mentions  the  fact  that  they  moulded  an  image  of 
wheaten  flower  with  the  blood  of  children,  and  eat  there- 
with their  unholy  communion.  Of  course,  there  could 
have  been  no  direct  intercourse  in  the  ninth  century  be- 
tween Armenia  and  Mexico  ;  but  the  accusation  shows  at 
least  that  similar  ceremonies  were  known  or  remembered 


5       i 


344 


SACRIFICE  AND  SACRAMENT. 


^••'' 


i\  '!  \ 


'  III     *•: 


*  ■■  t 


in  Asia  as  actual  practices.  Indeed,  the  Harranians  in  the 
middle  ages  annually  sacrificed  an  infant,  and  boiling  down 
its  flesh,  baked  it  into  cakes,  of  which  every  freeman  was 
allowed  to  partake.  In  both  these  cases,  we  have  the  two 
extremes  of  eating  the  god  combined  in  one  practice — the 
cannibal  rite  and  the  sacramental  corn-cake. 

Mr.  Frazer  calls  attention  to  another  interesting  transi- 
tional instance.  Loaves  made  in  the  shape  of  men  were 
called  at  Rome  Maniae  ;  and  it  appears  that  such  loaves 
were  specially  made  at  Aricia.  Now  Aricia  was  also  the 
one  place  in  Italy  where  a  divine  priest-king,  the  Rex 
Nemoralis,  lived  on  well  recognised  into  the  full  blaze  of 
the  historic  period,  on  the  old  savage  tenure  of  killing  his 
predecessor.  Again,  Mania  was  the  name  of  the  Mother 
or  Grandmother  of  Ghosts.  Woollen  images,  dedicated 
to  this  Latin  Cybele,  were  hung  out  in  Rome  at  the  feast 
of  the  Compitalia,  and  were  said  to  be  substitutes  for  hu- 
man victims.  Mr.  Frazer  suggests  that  the  loaves  in  hu- 
man form  which  were  baked  at  Aricia  were  sacramental 
bread  ;  and  that  in  old  days,  when  the  Rex  Nemoralis  was 
annually  slain,  loaves  were  also  made  in  his  image  as  in 
Mexico,  and  were  eaten  sacramentally  by  his  worshippers. 
I  do  not  hesitate  myself  to  suggest  still  further  that  the 
gingerbread  cakes,  shaped  like  a  man,  and  still  richly  gilt, 
which  are  sold  at  so  many  fairs  in  France  and  Italy,  and 
also  sometimes  in  England,  are  last  dying  relics  of  similar 
early  sacramental  images.  For  fairs  are  for  the  most  part 
diminished  survivals  of  religious  festivals. 

As  the  theanthropic  animal  victim  represents  a  man  and 
a  god,  it  is  reasonable  that  a  cake  shaped  as  an  animal  and 
baked  of  flour  should  sometimes  do  as  well  as  the  animal 
victim.  For  the  corn  is  aftei  all  the  embodiment  of  the 
corn-god.  Hence  bakers  in  the  antique  world  used  to 
keep  in  stock  representations  in  dough  of  the  various  sa- 
crificial animals,  for  people  who  were  too  poor  to  afTord 
the  originals.  Oxen  and  sheep  were  regularly  so  repre- 
sented.      When  Mithridates  besieged  Cyzicus,  and  the 


THE  SIN-EATER. 


345 


people  could  not  get  a  black  cow  to  sacrifice  to  Perse- 
phone, they  made  a  dough  cow  and  placed  it  at  the  altar. 
At  the  Athenian  festival  of  the  Diasia,  cakes  shaped  like 
animals  were  similarly  sacrificed  ;  and  at  the  Osiris  festi- 
val in  Egypt,  when  the  rich  offered  a  real  pig,  the  poor 
used  to  present  a  dough  pig  as  a  substitute,  like  the  dough 
pig  of  the  Irish  Canadians, 

But  in  many  other  rites,  the  sacramental  and  sacrificial 
cake  has  entirely  lost  all  semblance  of  a  man  or  animal. 
The  god  is  then  eaten  either  in  the  shapeless  form  of  a 
boiled  mess  of  rice  or  porridge,  or  in  a  round  cake  or  loaf, 
without  image  of  any  sort,  or  in  a  wafer  stamped  with  the 
solar  or  Christian  cross.  Instances  of  this  type  are  familiar 
to  everyone. 

More  closely  related  still  to  primitive  cannibalism  is  the 
curious  ritual  of  the  Sin-Eater,  so  well  elaborated  by  Mr. 
Sidney  Hartland.  In  Upper  Bavaria,  what  is  called  a 
corpse-cake  is  kneaded  from  flour,  and  placed  on  the  breast 
of  a  dead  person,  in  order  to  absorb  the  virtues  of  the  de- 
parted. This  cake  is  then  eaten  by  the  nearest  relation. 
In  the  Balkan  peninsula,  a  small  image  of  the  dead  person 
was  made  in  bread  and  eaten  by  the  survivors  of  the  family. 
These  are  intermediate  stages  between  cannibalism  and  the 
well-known  practice  of  sin-eating. 

I  hope  I  have  now  made  clear  the  general  affiliation 
which  I  am  seeking  to  suggest,  if  not  to  establish.  My 
idea  is  that  in  the  beginning  certain  races  devoured  their 
own  parents,  or  parts  of  them,  so  as  to  absorb  the  divine 
souls  of  their  forebears  into  their  own  bodies.  Later,  when 
artificial  god-making  became  a  frequent  usage,  especially 
in  connexion  with  agriculture,  men  eat  the  god,  or  part  of 
him,  for  a  similar  rtason.  But  they  likewise  eat  him  as 
the  corn  or  yam  or  jice,  sacramentally.  When  thean- 
thropic  victims  were  substituted  for  the  man-god,  they  eat 
the  theanthropic  victim  in  like  manner.  Also  they  made 
images  in  paste  of  both  man  and  beast,  and,  treating  these 
as  compounded  of  the  god,  similarly  sacrificed  and  eat 


(1 


I'  *: 
,'    i  ■  ■ 


346 


SACRIFICE  ANP  SACRAMENT. 


them.  And  they  drank  his  blood,  in  the  south  as  wine,  in 
the  north  as  beer,  in  India  as  soma.  If  this  line  of  recon- 
struction be  approximately  correct,  then  sacraments  as  a 
whole  are  in  the  last  resort  based  upon  survival  from  the 
cannibal  god-feast. 

It  is  a  significant  fact  that  in  many  cases,  as  at  the  Potraj 
festival,  the  officiating  priest  drinks  the  blood  of  the  divine 
victim,  while  the  laity  are  only  permitted  to  eat  of  its  body. 


i  ■   . 


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THE  IDEA  OF  ATONEMENT  NOT  PRIMITIVE. 


347 


in 
)n- 
5  a 
the 

raj 
ine 
dy. 


CHAPTER  XVI. 


THE   DOCTRINE   OF   THE   ATONEMENT. 


One  more  element  of  some  importance  yet  remains  in 
the  complex  conception  of  the  human  or  animal  victim, 
or  slain  god,  which  we  must  briefly  examine  before  we  can 
proceed  with  advantage  to  the  evolution  of  Christianity; 
I  mean  the  doctrine  of  piacular  sacrifice — or,  in  other 
words,  of  the  atonement. 

"  Without  shedding  of  blood,"  says  the  author  of  one 
of  the  earliest  Christian  tractates,  "  there  is  no  remission  of 
sin."  This  is  a  common  theory  in  all  advanced  religions; 
the  sacrifice  is  regarded,  not  merely  as  the  self-immolation 
of  a  willing  divine  victim  or  incarnate  god,  but  also  as  an 
expiation  for  crimes  committed.  "  Behold  the  Lamb  of 
God,"  says  the  Baptist  in  the  legend,  "  which  taketh  away 
the  sins  of  ^;he  world." 

This  idea,  I  take  it,  is  not  primitive.  Sin  must  be 
regarded  as  a  late  ethical  intruder  into  the  domain  of  re- 
ligion. Early  man  for  the  most  part  takes  his  gods 
joyously.  He  is  on  the  best  of  terms  with  them.  He  eats 
and  drinks  and  carouses  in  their  presence.  They  join  in 
his  phallic  and  bacchanalian  orgies.  They  are  not  great 
moral  censors,  like  the  noble  creation  of  the  Hebrew 
prophets,  "  of  purer  eyes  than  to  behold  iniquity."  They 
are  creatures  of  like  passions  and  failings  with  himself, — 
dear  ancestors  and  friends,  ever  ready  to  overlook  small 
human  frailties  like  murder  or  rapine,  but  exercising  a 
fatherly  care  for  the  most  part  over  the  lives  and  fortunes 
of  their  descendants  or  tribesmen.     Angry  they  may  be  at 


I    > 


'A 


348 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF   THE  ATONEMENT. 


I  ,'M 


/     t 


times,  no  doubt;  but  their  anger  as  a  rule  can  be  easily 
assuaged  by  a  human  victim,  or  by  the  blood  of  slaugh- 
tered goats  and  bulls.  Under  normal  circumstances,  they 
are  familiar  housemates.  Their  skulls  or  images  adorn 
the  hearth.  They  assist  at  the  family  and  domestic 
feasts  ;  and  they  lick  up  the  offerings  of  blood  or  wine 
made  to  them  with  a  smiling  countenance.  In  short,  they 
are  average  members  of  the  tribe,  gone  before  to  the  spirit- 
world  ;  and  they  continue  to  share  without  pride  or 
asceticism  in  the  joys  and  feasti.  and  merry-makings  of 
their  relatives. 

Thus  the  idea  of  expiation,  save  as  a  passing  appease- 
ment for  a  temporary  tiff,  did  not  probably  occur  in  the 
very  earliest  and  most  primitive  religions.  It  is  only  later, 
as  ethical  ideas  begin  to  obtrude  themselves  into  the  sacred 
cycle,  that  the  notion  of  sin,  \*rhich  is  primarily  that  of  an 
offence  against  the  establisb  d  etiquette  of  the  gods, 
makes  itself  slowly  visib'e,  In  many  cases,  later  glosses 
seem  to  put  a  piacular  sense  upon  what  was  in  its  origin 
by  obvious  analogy  a  mere  practical  god-making  and  god- 
slaying  ceremony.  But  in  more  consciously  philosophic 
stages  of  religion  this  idea  of  atonement  gains  ground  so 
fast  that  it  almost  swallows  up  the  earlier  conception  of 
communion  or  feasting  together.  Sacrifice  is  then  chiefly 
conceived  of  as  a  piacular  offering  to  a  justly  offended 
or  estranged  deity;  this  is  the  form  of  belief  which  we  find 
almost  everywhere  meeting  us  in  the  hecatombs  of  the 
Homeric  poems,  as  in  many  works  of  Hellenic  and  Semitic 
literature. 

In  particular,  the  piacular  sacrifice  seems  to  have  crys- 
tallised and  solidified  round  the  sacred  person  of  the  artifi- 
cial deity.  "  The  accumulated  misfortunes  and  sins  of  the 
whole  people,"  says  Mr.  Frazer,  "  are  sometimes  laid  upon 
the  dying  god,  who  is  supposed  to  bear  them  awa\  for 
ever,  leaving  the  people  innocent  and  happy."  "  Surely 
he  hath  borne  our  griefs  and  carried  our  sorrows,"  says  one 
of  the  Hebrew  poets,  whose  verses  are  conjecturally  at- 


SCAPEGOATS. 


349 


tributed  to  Isaiah,  about  one  such  divhie  scapegoat;  "  yet 
we  did  esteem  him  stricken,  smitten  of  God,  and  afflicted. 
He  was  wounded  for  our  transgressions;  he  was  bruised 
for  our  iniquities.  The  chastisement  of  our  peace  was 
upon  him,  and  with  his  stripes  are  we  healed.  Jahweh  hath 
laid  upon  him  the  iniquity  of  us  all." 

The  ideas  here  expressed  in  such  noble  language  were 
common  to  all  the  later  man-gods  of  the  more  advanced 
and  ethical  religions. 

Mr.  Frazer  is  probably  right  in  connecting  the  notion 
of  the  scapegoat,  human  or  animal,  with  the  popular  bar- 
baric idea  of  the  transference  of  evils.  Thus,  in  popular 
magic  of  all  nations,  diseases  of  every  sort,  from  serious 
fevers  and  ]/lagues,  down  to  headache,  toothache,  warts, 
and  sores,  are  transferred  by  some  simple  ceremony  of 
witchcraft  to  animals,  rag^,  or  other  people.  I  will  quote 
examples  but  briefly.  Epilepsy  is  made  over  to  leaves  and 
thrown  away  in  the  Malay  Archipelago.  Toothache  is 
put  into  a  stone  in  Australia.  A  Bechuana  king  gave  his 
illness  to  an  ox,  which  was  drowned  in  his  stead,  to  secure 
his  recovery.  Mr.  Gomme  quotes  a  terrible  story  of  a 
Scotch  nobleman  who  transferred  his  mortal  disease  to  his 
brother  by  a  magical  ceremony.  *'  Charms  "  for  fever  or 
for  warts  generally  contain  some  such  amiable  element  of 
transferring  the  trouble  to  a  string,  a  rag,  or  a  piece  of 
paper,  which  is  flung  away  to  carry  the  evil  with  it  to  the 
person  who  next  touches  it.  Numerous  cases  of  like  im- 
plication may  be  found  in  the  works  of  Mr.  Gomme  and 
Mr.  Hartland,  to  which  I  would  refer  enquirers  after  fur- 
ther evidence. 

Closely  connected  with  these  notions  of  transference 
are  also  the  occasional  or  periodical  ceremonies  under- 
taken for  the  expulsion  of  evils  from  a  village  or  a  com- 
munity. Devils,  demons,  hostile  spirits,  diseases,  and 
other  misfortunes  of  every  sort  are  frequently  thus  ex- 
pelled with  gongs,  drums,  and  other  magical  instruments. 
Often  the  boundaries  of  the  tribe  or  parish  are  gone  over, 


350 


THE  DOCTRINE  Of  THE  ATONEMENT. 


a  perlustration  is  performed,  and  the  evil  influences  are 
washed  out  of  the  territory  or  forcibly  ejected.  Our  own 
rite  of  Beating  the  Bounds  represents  on  one  of  its  many 
sides  this  primitive  ceremony.  Washings  and  dippings 
are  frequent  accompaniments  of  the  expulsive  ritual;  in 
Peru,  it  was  also  bound  up  with  that  common  feature  of 
the  corn-god  sacrament — a  cake  kneaded  with  the  blood 
of  living  children.  The  periodical  exorcism  generally 
takes  place  once  a  year,  but  is  sometimes  biennial:  it  has 
obvious  relations  with  the  sacrifice  of  the  human  or  animal 
victim.  In  Europe,  it  still  survives  in  many  places  as  the 
yearly  expulsion  of  witches.  The  whole  subject  has  been 
so  admirably  treated  by  Mr.  Frazer  that  I  have  nothing  to 
add  to  his  excellent  exposition. 

Putting  these  two  cardinal  ideas  together,  we  arrive  at 
the  compound  conception  of  the  scapegoat.  A  scape- 
goat is  a  human  or  animal  victim,  chosen  to  carry  oflf,  at 
first  the  misfortunes  or  diseases,  later  the  sin  and  guilt  of 
the  community.  The  name  by  which  we  designate  it  in 
English,  being  taken  from  the  derivative  Hebrew  usage, 
has  animal  implications;  but,  as  in  all  analogous  cases,  I 
do  not  doubt  that  the  human  evil-bearer  precedes  the  ani- 
mal one. 

A  good  example  of  this  incipient  stage  in  the  evolution 
of  the  scapegoat  occurs  at  Onitsha,  on  the  Quorra  River. 
Two  human  beings  are  there  annually  sacrificed,  "to  take 
away  the  sins  of  the  land  " — though  I  suspect  it  would  be 
more  true  to  native  ideas  to  say,  "  the  misfortunes."  The 
number  two,  as  applied  to  the  victims,  crops  up  frequently 
in  this  special  connexion.  The  victims  here  again  are 
"  bought  with  a  price  " — purchased  by  public  subscription. 
All  persons  who  during  the  previous  year  have  committed 
gross  offences  against  native  ethics  are  expected  to  con- 
tribute to  the  cost  of  the  victims.  Two  sickly  people  are 
bought  with  the  money,  "  one  for  the  land  and  one  for  the 
river."  The  victims  are  dragged  along  the  ground  to  the 
place  of  execution,  face  downward.     The  crowd  who  ac- 


TRANSFERENCE  OF  EVILS. 


351 


company  them  cry,  "  Wickedness  !  wickedness  !  "  So  in 
Siam  it  was  customary  to  choose  a  broken-down  woman 
of  evil  life,  carry  her  on  a  litter  through  the  streets  (which 
is  usually  a  symbol  of  kingship  or  godhead)  and  throw 
her  on  a  dunghill  or  hedge  of  thorns  outside  the  wall,  for- 
bidding her  ever  again  to  enter  the  city.  In  this  eastern 
case,  there  is  mere  expulsion,  not  actual  killing. 

In  other  instances,  however,  the  divine  character  at- 
tributed to  the  human  scapegoat  is  quite  unmistakable. 
Among  the  Gonds  of  India,  at  the  festival  of  the  god  of  the 
crops,  the  deity  descends  on  the  head  of  one  of  the  wor- 
shippers, who  is  seized  with  a  fit,  and  rushes  off  to  the 
jungle.  There,  it  is  believed  he  would  die  of  himself,  if 
he  were  not  brought  back  and  tenderly  treated:  but  the 
Gonds,  more  merciful  here  than  in  many  other  cases,  take 
him  back  and  restore  him.  The  idea  is  that  he  is  thus  singled 
out  to  bear  the  sins  of  the  rest  of  the  village.  At  Halber- 
stadt  in  Thuringia  an  exactly  similar  custom  survived  till 
late  in  the  middle  ages.  A  man  was  chosen,  stained  with 
deadly  sin,  as  the  public  scapegoat.  On  the  first  day  of 
Lent  he  was  dressed  in  mourning,  and  expelled  from 
church.  For  forty  days,  he  wandered  about,  fed  only  by 
the  priests,  and  no  one  would  speak  to  him.  He  slept  in 
the  street.  On  tli.^  day  before  Good  Friday,  however,  he 
was  absolved  of  his  ■'i'  .->.  and  being  called  Adam,  was  be- 
lieved to  be  nor'  if.  g  s<^:e  of  innocence.  This  is  a  miti- 
gated and  ChrJslianistl  f  )rm  of  the  human  sin-offering. 

Again,  die  yl;>anj;.!v  of  the  Eastern  Caucasus  kept  a 
number  of  ;:;:.crvd  .  'ivv-i  in  the  temple  of  the  moon,  many 
of  whom  were  inspired  utid  prophesied.  When  one  of 
these  men  exhibited  unusual  symptoms  of  inspiration,  the 
high  priest  had  him  bound  with  a  sacred  chain,  and  main- 
tained for  a  year  in  luxury,  like  the  Mexican  corn-god. 
This  fact  immediately  brings  the  human  scapegoat  into 
line  with  the  annual  human  gods  we  have  already  con- 
sidered. At  the  end  of  a  year,  he  was  anointed  with  un- 
guents (or,  so  to  speak,  christed),  and  led  forth  to  be 


I  I  m 


352 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  ATONEMENT. 


■J,, 


'l--' 

sacrificed.     The  sacrifice  was  accomplished  as  a  purifi- 
catory ceremony. 

Mr.  Frazer,  to  whom  I  owe  all  these  examples,  connects 
with  such  rites  the  curious  ceremony  of  the  expulsion  of 
the  Old  Mars,  the  Mamurius  Veturius,  at  Rome.  Every 
year  on  the  14th  of  March  (near  the  spring  equinox),  a 
man,  called  by  the  name  of  a  god,  was  clad  in  skins — the 
significance  of  which  rite  we  now  know — and  after  being 
beaten  with  long  white  rods,  was  expelled  the  city. 
From  one  point  of  view,  this  personage  no  doubt  repre- 
sented the  god  of  vegetation  of  the  previous  year  (for  the 
Mars  was  originally  an  annual  corn-god).  But  from 
another  point  of  view,  being  now  of  no  further  use  to  the 
community,  he  was  utilised  with  true  old  Roman  par- 
simony as  a  scapegoat,  and  sent  to  carry  away  the  offences 
of  the  people.  Indeed,  there  seems  to  be  some  reason  for 
believing  that  he  was  driven  into  the  territory  of  the  hostile 
Oscans.  In  this  case  we  perceive  that  an  annual  god  is 
made  the  sin-offering  for  the  crimes  of  a  nation. 

In  Greece,  we  get  similar  traces  of  the  human  scape- 
goat. At  Chseronea  in  Boeotia,  the  chief  magistrate  at 
the  town-hall,  and  every  householder  in  his  own  house, 
as  we  learn  from  Plutarch  (who  was  himself  a  magistrate 
there)  had  on  a  certain  day  to  beat  a  slave  with  rods  oi 
agnus  castus,  and  turn  him  out  of  doors,  with  the  formula, 
"  Out,  hunger  !  in,  health  and  wealth  ! "  Elsewhere  the 
custom  retained  more  unpleasant  features.  At  Marseilles, 
when  the  colony  was  ravaged  by  plague,  \  man  of  the 
poorer  classes  used  voluntarily  to  offer  hinself  as  a  sin- 
offering  or  scapegoat.  Here  we  have  once  more  the  com- 
mon episode  of  the  willing  victim.  For  a  whole  year,  like 
other  annual  gods,  he  was  fed  at  the  public  expense,  and 
treated  as  a  gentleman — that  is  to  say,  a  kingly  man-god. 
At  the  end  of  that  time,  he  was  dressed  in  sacred  garments 
— ano  her  mark  of  godship — decked  with  holy  branches, 
the  common  insignia  of  ^^ods  of  vegetation,  and  led 
through  the  city,  while  prayers  were  offered  up  that  the 


HUMAN  SCAPEGOATS. 


353 


the 

les, 

the 

sin- 

tom- 

Uke 

and 

god. 

lents 

:hes, 

led 

the 


sins  of  the  people  might  fall  on  his  head.  He  was  then 
cast  out  of  the  colony.  The  Athenians  kept  a  number  of 
outcasts  as  public  victims  at  the  expense  of  the  town;  and 
when  plague,  drought,  or  famine  befell,  sacrificed  two  of 
them  (note  the  number)  as  human  scapegoats.  One  was 
said  to  be  a  substitute  for  the  men,  and  one  for  the  women. 
They  were  led  about  the  city  (like  Beating  the  Bounds 
again)  and  then  apparently  stoned  to  death  without  it. 
Moreover,  periodically  every  year,  at  the  festival  of  the 
Thargelia,  two  victims  were  stoned  to  death  as  scapegoats 
at  Athens,  one  for  the  men,  and  one  for  the  women.  I 
would  conjecturally  vf,nture  to  connect  this  sacred  num- 
ber, not  merely  with  the  African  practice  already  noted, 
but  also  with  the  dual  kings  at  Sparta,  the  two  consuls  at 
Rome,  and  the  two  sufifetes  at  Carthage  and  in  other 
Semitic  cities.  The  duality  of  kings,  indeed,  is  a  frequent 
phenomenon. 

I  can  only  add  here  that  the  many  other  ceremonies  con- 
nected with  these  human  scapegoats  have  been  well  ex- 
pounded and  explained  by  Mannhardt,  who  shows  that 
they  were  all  of  a  purificatory  character,  and  that  the 
scourging  of  the  god  before  putting  him  to  death  was  a 
necessary  point  of  divine  procedure.  Hence  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  agniis  castits. 

Briefly,  then,  the  evidence  collected  by  Mannhardt  and 
Frazer  suffices  to  suggest  that  the  human  scapegoat  was 
the  last  term  of  a  god,  condemned  to  death,  upon  whose 
head  the  transgression  or  misfortunes  of  the  community 
wtre  laid  as  substitute.  He  was  the  vicarious  offering  who 
died  for  the  people. 

It  is  only  here  and  there,  however,  that  the  scapegoat 
retains  to  historical  times  his  first  early  form  as  a  human 
victim.  Much  more  often,  in  civilised  lands  at  least,  we 
get  the  usual  successive  mitigations  of  the  custom.  Some- 
times, as  we  have  seen  already  in  these  cases,  the  victim  is 
not  actually  killed,  but  merely  expelled,  or  even  only  play- 
fully and  ceremonially  driven  out  of  the  city.     In  other  in- 


J  1f' 


354 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF   THE  ATONEMENT. 


«l:, 


y^jf 


I 


stances,  we  get  the  familiar  substitution  of  the  condemned 
criminal,  or  the  imbecile,  as  in  the  Attic  Thargelia.  The 
Greeks  of  Asia  Minor  used  actually  to  burn  their  atone- 
ment-victim, and  cast  his  ashes  into  the  sea  ;  but  the 
Leucadians  merely  threw  down  a  condemned  prisoner 
from  a  clifif,  and  lightened  his  fall  by  fastening  live  birds 
to  him,  while  they  kept  boats  below  to  save  him  from 
drowning,  and  carry  him  well  beyond  the  frontier.  In  the 
vast  majority  of  cases,  however,  we  have  the  still  more 
common  substitution  of  a  sacred  animal  for  a  human  vic- 
tim; and  this  appears  to  be  in  large  part  the  origin  of  that 
common  religious  feature,  the  piacular  sacrifice. 

Occasionally  we  get  historical  or  half-historical  evidence 
of  the  transition  from  a  human  victim  to  a  divine  or  quasi- 
divine  animal.  Thus,  the  people  of  Nias  offer  either  a  red 
horse  or  a  buffalo  to  purify  the  land ;  but  formerly,  a  man 
was  bound  to  the  same  stake  with  the  buffalo,  and  when 
the  buffalo  was  killed,  the  man  was  driven  away,  no  native 
daring  to  receive  him  or  feed  him.  The  sacrificial  camel 
of  the  ancient  Arabs,  presumably  piacular,  is  expressly 
stated  to  be  a  substitute  for  a  human  victim.  The  favourite 
victims  of  the  Saracens  were  young  and  beautiful  captives: 
but  if  such  were  not  to  be  procured,  they  contented  them- 
selves with  a  white  and  faultless  camel.  The  step  hence 
to  the  habitual  immolation  or  driving  foith  of  a  divine  ani- 
mal in  place  of  a  divine  or  quasi-divine  man  is  a  very  small 
one.  In  Malabar,  the  cow  is  a  sacred  beast,  and  to  kill  or 
eat  a  cow  is  a  crime  like  murder.  Nevertheless,  the  Brah- 
mans  transfer  the  sins  of  the  people  to  a  cow  or  cows, 
which  are  then  driven  out  wherever  the  Brahmans  appoint. 
The  ancient  Egyptians  used  to  sacrifice  a  bull,  and  lay 
upon  its  head  all  the  evils  which  might  otherwise  happen 
to  themselves  and  their  country;  tlen  they  sold  the  bull's 
head  to  the  Greeks,  or  flung  it  into  the  river.  (Contrast 
this  effort  to  get  rid  of  the  accursed  head  with  the  careful 
preservatio  i  and  worship  of  the  sacred  one.)  The  best- 
known  case  of  all,  of  course,  is  the  Hebrew  scapegoat,  which 


ANIMAL  SUBSTITUTES. 


355 


was  the  sacred  animal  of  a  shepherd  people,  turned  out  to 
die  of  hunger  or  thirst  in  the  desert,  and  bearing  on  its 
head  the  sins  of  the  people.  (Contrast  the  scapegoat  with 
the  paschal  lamb,  and  compare  with  the  goats  and  sheep 
of  the  last  judgment.)  When  cholera  rages  among  the 
aboriginal  tribes  of  India,  they  take  a  goat  or  a  bufifalo — in 
either  case  a  female,  the  most  sacred  sex  in  Indian  sacri- 
fice, and  black  all  over,  like  Apis  and  Mnevis;  they  turn  it 
out  of  the  village,  with  magical  ceremonies,  and  do  not 
allow  it  to  return  within  their  precincts.  In  many  other 
similar  poojahs,  the  victim  is  a  goat.  Mr.  Frazer  has  col- 
lected, here  as  elsewhere,  a  vast  number  of  valuable  and 
illustrative  instances. 

As  a  rule,  the  man-god  or  divine  animal  selected  as  a 
scapegoat  is  not  actually  slaughtered,  in  the  fullest  form  of 
the  rite;  he  is  driven  away,  or  flung  into  the  sea,  or  left  to 
die  of  hunger  and  thirst.  Sometimes,  however,  he  is 
burned  as  a  holocaust:  sometimes  he  is  stoned,  and  some- 
times slaughtered.  And  in  later  and  less  perfect  forms  of 
piacular  animal  sacrifice,  slaughter  was  the  rule,  save 
where  burning  had  ousted  it.  Indeed,  in  many  cases,  it 
is  difficult  to  disentangle  the  various  elements  of  the  com- 
plex problem.  People  had  got  accustomed  to  certain 
forms  of  sacrifice,  and  mixed  them  up  indiscriminately,  so 
that  one  and  the  same  rite  seems  sometime  to  be  sacra- 
mentd,  sacrificial,  and  piacular,  all  at  once.  Thus  Dr. 
Robertson  Smith  writes  of  ancient  Egypt  :  "  Bulls  were 
offered  on  the  altar,  and  part  of  the  flesh  eaten  in  a  sacri- 
ficial feast  ;  but  the  sacrifice  was  only  permitted  as  a 
piaculum,  was  preceded  by  a  solemn  fast,  and  was  accom- 
panied by  public  lamentation,  as  at  the  death  of  a  kins- 
man." Compare  the  annual  mourning  for  Adonis  ;  and 
also  the  similar  union  of  sacrifice,  sacrament,  and  atone- 
ment in  the  Mass,  which,  at  the  great  resurrection-festival 
of  the  Christian  year,  Easter,  is  equally  preceded  by  a  fast^ 
and  by  the  solemn  mourning  of  Good  Friday. 

Now,  I  do  not  pretend  to  discriminate  accurately  in 


V5^ 


356 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  ATONEMENT. 


these  very  mixed  cases  between  one  element  and  another 
in  the  compound  rite.  Often  enough,  all  the  various 
traits  of  god-slaying,  of  sacrament,  and  of  public  expiation 
are  evidently  present.  Usually,  too,  the  victim  is  slain 
before  the  altar  or  sacred  stone  of  some  earlier  and  greater 
god,  and  its  blood  poured  forth  for  him.  Thus,  in  the 
Hebrew  ritual  both  of  the  holocaust  and  the  sin-offering, 
the  victim  is  slain  at  the  altar,  "  before  Jahweh,"  and  the 
effusion  of  blood  on  the  sacred  slab  has  a  special  signifi- 
cance. In  the  Semitic  field,  as  Dr.  Robertson  Smith 
observes  (and  I  would  add,  in  most  others),  "  the  funda- 
mental idea  of  sacrifice  is  not  that  of  a  sacred  tribute,  but 
of  joint  communion  between  the  god  and  his  worshippers, 
by  joint  participation  in  the  living  flesh  and  blood  of  a 
sacred  victim."  But  the  identity  of  god  and  victim  is 
often  quite  clear  ;  thus,  as  we  saw  before,  the  sheep- 
Aphrodite  was  worshipped  in  Cyprus  with  an  annual 
mystic  and  piacular  sacrifice  of  a  sheep;  and  the  worship- 
pers themselves  were  clad  in  sheepskins,  a  rite  whose  sig- 
nificance is  now  abundantly  evident  to  us. 

On  the  whole,  then,  at  the  stage  we  have  at  last  reached, 
I  will  not  attempt  to  distinguish  in  every  case  between 
the  various  superposed  ideas  in  the  sacrificial  ceremony. 
Most  sacrifices  seem  in  the  last  resort  to  be  substitutes  for 
human-divine  victims.  Most  seem  to  be  sacramental,  and 
most  to  be  more  or  less  distinctly  piacular.  I  do  not  even 
know  whether,  in  reconstructing  afresh  for  others  a  series 
of  rites  the  ideas  of  which  have  grown  slowly  clear  to  my 
own  mind  by  consideration  of  numerous  mixed  examples,  I 
have  always  placed  each  particular  fact  in  its  best  and 
most  effective  position  for  illustration.  The  elements  of 
the  problem  are  so  involved  and  so  closely  interosculating. 
For  instance,  I  do  not  doubt  that  the  great  Phoenician  and 
Carthaginian  holocausts  of  human  victims,  which  I  was 
compelled  at  first  to  treat  most  inadequately,  were  mainly 
piacular  in  intention ;  nor  do  I  doubt  that  the  Greek  heca- 
tomb (or  holocaust  of  a  hundred  oxen)  was  a  mitigation  or 


PIACULAR  SACRIFICE. 


357 


attenuation  of  such  gigantic  human  holocausts  as  these,  or 
as  those  attributed  to  the  British  Druids.  Asclepiades  states 
expressly  that  every  victim  was  originally  regarded  as  a 
substitute  for  human  sacrifice  ;  and  so,  in  the  Elohistic 
account  of  the  origin  of  burnt  sacrifice,  a  ram  is  accepted 
as  a  substitute  for  the  life  of  Isaac,  the  dearly-beloved  son 
whom  the  chief  or  king,  Abraham,  intends  to  ®fTer  as  a 
royal  victim  to  his  tribal  god.  Abraham  says  that  the  god 
himself  will  provide  a  victim;  and  the  ram  then,  as  it  were, 
voluntarily  offers  itself.  So  at  the  great  temple  of  Astarte 
at  Eryx,  where  the  victims  were  drawn  from  the  sacred  or 
divine  herds  kept  at  the  sanctuary,  the  chosen  beast  was 
believed  of  its  own  accord  to  present  itself  at  the  altar. 
At  the  Diipolia  in  like  manner  a  number  of  bulls  were 
driven  together  round  the  holy  table  ;  and  the  bull  was 
selected  which  voluntarily  approached  and  eat  of  the 
sacred  cakes  ;  thereby  not  only  showing  himself  to  be  a 
willing  victim,  but  also  doubly  divine,  first  because  he 
took  the  food  intended  for  the  god,  and  second  because 
he  swallowed  the  sacred  corn,  itself  the  duplicate  body  of 
the  deity.  (Compare,  of  course,  the  Hebrew  shewbread.) 
I  need  not  pursue  this  line  of  thought  any  further.  It 
must  be  obv^ious  that  many  sacrifices  at  least  are  sacra- 
mentally-piacular  god-slaying  ceremonies,  and  that  in 
most  of  them  the  god  is  slain,  himself  to  himself,  in  human 
or  animal  form,  as  an  expiation  of  crimes  against  his  own 
majesty.  Nor  need  I  point  out  how  this  complex  concept 
lies  at  the  very  root  of  Pauline  theology. 

I  would  like  to  add,  however,  that  the  ideas  here  for- 
mulated must  give  a  new  meaning  to  many  points  we 
could  not  at  first  understand  in  ceremonies  mentioned  in 
our  earlier  chapters.  I  will  take  only  one  example — that 
of  the  place  of  Samoyed  sacrifice  which  Baron  Norden- 
skiold  saw  on  Vaygats  Island,  We  can  now  divine  the 
meaning  of  the  heap  of  reindeer  skulls  piled  around  the 
rude  open-air  shrine;  for  reindeer  are  the  sacred  and  the- 
anthropic  animals  of  the  northern  races;  while  the  preser- 


358 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  ATONEMENT 


I) 

I 


f  "'!; 


vation  of  their  heads  at  the  hypcethral  altar  of  the  elder 
gods  or  ghosts  has  its  usual  holy  and  oracular  meaning. 
We  can  also  guess  why  remains  of  a  fireplace  could  be 
seen  by  the  side,  at  which  the  sacrificial  and  sacramental 
meal  was  habitually  prepared;  and  why  the  mouths  of  the 
idols  were  smeared  with  blood,  in  order  to  make  the  older 
gods  or  ghosts  participators  in  the  festival.  Indeed,  any 
reader  who  has  followed  me  thus  far,  and  who  now  turns 
back  to  the  earlier  chapters  of  this  book,  will  find  that 
many  details  appear  to  him  in  quite  a  different  light,  and 
will  see  why  I  have  insisted  beforehand  on  some  minor 
points  which  must  have  seemed  to  him  at  the  time  wholly 
irrelevant. 

Many  other  curious  ceremonies  that  seem  equally  mean- 
ingless at  first  in  narratives  of  travel  will  also  come  to  have 
a  significant  meaning  wheii  thus  regarded.  For  instance, 
Mr.  Chalmers  tells  us  that  among  the  New  Guinea  natives 
of  particular  districts,  "  pigs  are  never  killed  but  in  the  one 
place,  and  then  they  are  ofifered  to  the  spirit.  The  blood 
is  poured  out  there,  and  the  carcase  is  then  carried  back  to 
the  village,  to  be  divided,  cooked,  and  eaten.  Pigs'  skulls 
are  kept  and  hung  up  in  the  house.  Food  for  a  feast,  such 
as  at  house-building  " — a  most  pregnant  hint — "  is  placed 
near  the  post  where  the  skulls  hang,  and  a  prayer  is  said. 
When  the  centre-post  is  set  up,  the  spirits  have  wallaby, 
fish,  and  bananas  presented  to  them,  and  they  are  be- 
sought to  keep  that  house  always  full  of  food,  and  that  it 
may  not  fall  when  the  wind  is  strong."  If  we  recall  other 
cases  elsewhere,  we  can  hardly  doubt  that  the  pigs  in  these 
instances  are  killed  as  sacred  victims  at  the  grave  of  the 
chief  family  ancestor;  especially  when  Mr.  Chalmers  also 
tells  us  that  "each  family  has  a  sacred  place  where  they 
carry  offerings  to  the  spirits  jf  deceased  ancestors,  whom 
they  greatly  fear."  When  sickness,  famine,  or  scarcity  of 
fish  occur,  it  is  these  spirits  that  have  to  be  appeased. 
And  if  we  recollect  once  more  that  in  so  many  cases  the 
central  post  of  the  hut  is  based  on  a  human  or  animal  vic- 


1  ■  f 


U       ^^ 


SAVAGE  THEOLOGY. 


359 


tim,  both  in  New  Guinea  and  elsewhere,  we  can  hardly 
doubt  that  to  this  household  god  or  foundation-ghost  the 
offerings  at  the  central  post  are  presented.  Finally,  the 
skulls  of  the  pigs  which  are  kept  in  the  house  and  hung  on 
the  post  remind  us  on  the  one  hand  of  the  skulls  of  ances- 
tor-gods similarly  preserved,  and  on  the  other  hand  of  the 
skulls  of  theanthropic  victims  kept  by  the  people  of  India 
at  their  festivals,  or  fastened  by  early  Greeks  and  Romans 
on  their  temples.  "  They  cook  the  heads  of  their  slain 
enemies,"  says  Mr.  Chalmers  again,  "  to  secure  clean  skulls 
to  put  on  sacred  places."  Adequately  to  develop  the  hints 
thus  suggested,  however,  would  require  another  book  as 
long  as  the  present  one. 

Yet  here  is  just  one  more  such  hint,  from  the  same  au- 
thor, too  pregnant  to  be  omitted. 

*  When  the  natives  begin  planting,  they  first  take  a 
bur.'ch  of  bananas  and  sugar-cane,  and  go  to  the  centre  of 
the  plantation,  and  call  over  the  names  of  the  dead  belong- 
ing to  their  family,  adding:  *  There  is  your  food,  your  ba- 
nanas and  sugar-cane;  let  our  food  grow  well,  and  let  it 
be  plentiful.  If  it  does  not  grow  well  and  plentiful,  you  all 
will  be  full  of  shame,  and  so  shall  we.' 

"  When  they  go  on  trading  expeditions,  they  present 
their  food  to  the  spirits  at  the  centre-post  of  the  house, 
and  ask  the  spirits  to  go  before  them  and  prepare  the  peo- 
ple, so  that  the  trading  may  be  prosperous. 

"  When  sickness  is  in  the  family,  a  pig  is  brought  to 
the  sacred  place  of  the  great  spirit "  (probably  the  chief 
ancestral  ghost),  "  and  killed.  The  carcase  is  then  taken 
to  the  sacred  place  of  the  family,  and  the  spirits  are  asked 
to  accept  it.  Sins  are  confessed,  such  as  bananas  that  are 
taken,  or  cocoanuts,  and  none  have  been  presented,  and 
leave  not  given  to  eat  them.  *  There  is  a  pig;  accept,  and 
remove  the  sickness.'  Death  follows,  and  the  day  of  bu- 
rial arrives.  The  friends  all  stand  round  the  open  grave, 
and  the  chief's  sister  or  cousin  "  (the  primitive  priestess) 
**  calls  out  in  a  loud  voice,  '  You  have  been  angry  with  us 


11 


lit 


■'  f 


.^.  ^ 

.  '■■    ' 

1    ■      •  1 

t 
''         ,1:.     :.  V. 

360 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  ATONEMENT. 


"*  i 


for  the  bananas  we  have  taken  (or  cocoanuts,  as  the  case 
may  be),  and  you  have,  in  your  anger,  taken  this  child. 
Now  let  it  suffice,  and  bury  your  anger.'  The  body  is 
then  placed  in  the  grave,  and  covered  over  with  earth." 

Here  we  have  in  brief  a  perfect  epitome  of  savage  the- 
olog) ,  savage  ceremonial,  and  savage  atonement.  I  could 
enlarge  not  a  little  on  its  numerous  implications. 

A  single  quotation  from  Mr.  Savage  Landor's  work  on 
The  Hairy  Ainu  of  Japan  will  also  serve  as  an  excellent 
summary  of  such  encyclopaedic  barbaric  theology.  "  If 
they  have  any  belief  at  all,"  he  says,  "  it  is  an  imperfect 
kind  of  Totemism,  and  the  central  point  of  that  belief  is 
their  owm  descent  from  the  bear.  This  does  not  include 
the  smallest  reverence  for  their  ancestor.  They  capture 
their  Totem  and  keep  it  in  captivity;  they  speak  to  it  and 
feed  it;  but  no  prayers  are  oflfered  to  it.  When  the  bear 
is  fat,  it  is  taken  out  of  the  cage  to  be  ill-treated  and  baited 
by  all  the  men  present."  Like  the  Khond  Meriah  and 
the  tortures  of  martyrs.  "It  is  tied  to  a  stake"  or  stauros  or 
accursed  tree,  "and  a  pole  is  thrust  into  its  mouth;  and 
when  the  poor  beast  has  been  sufficiently  tortured,  pricked 
with  pointed  sticks,  shot  at  with  blunted  arrows,"  like  St. 
Sebastian,  "  bruised  with  stones,"  like  St.  Stephen,  "  mad- 
dened with  rage  and  ill-usage,  it  is  killed  outright,  and, 
ancestor  as  it  may  be,  it  makes  the  chief  dish  and  raison 
d'etre  of  a  festival,  where  all  the  members  of  the  tribe  par- 
take of  its  flesh.  The  owner  of  the  hut  in  which  the  feast 
takes  place  then  sticks  the  skull  on  to  a  forked  pole,  and 
sets  it  outside  with  the  others  at  the  east  end  of  his  hut. 
The  skin  is  made  into  garments,  or  is  spread  on  the  ground 
to  sleep  on."  Here,  I  need  hardly  say,  we  have  sacrifice, 
sacrament,  orientation,  the  sacred  head,  the  use  of  the 
skm  as  a  covering  of  the  worshipper,  and  all.  the  other 
traits  of  theanthropic  substitution. 

It  is  more  to  our  purpose  now,  however,  to  remember 
these  two  cardinal  points  :  first,  that  a  dying  god,  human 
or  animal,  is  usually  selected  as  a  convenient  vehicle  for 


REMISSION  OF  SINS. 


361 


the  sins  of  the  people;  and  second,  that  "  without  shedding 
of  blood  there  is  no  remission  of  sin."  These  two  doctrines 
were  commorly  current  all  over  the  world,  but  especially 
in  that  Eastern  Mediterranean  world  where  Christianity 
was  first  evolved.  Indeed,  they  were  there  so  generally 
recognised  that  the  writers  of  the  earliest  Christian  trac- 
tates, the  Apostolic  Epistles,  take  them  for  granted  as  self- 
evident — as  principles  of  which  every  intelligent  man 
would  at  once  admit  the  truth  and  cogency. 


1 

( .,  ■ 

'1 

/ 

1 

1 

.!  ,,    > 

' 

1 

362 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


CHAPTER  XVII. 


I 


((Ml 


( 


ii 


'M 

! 

II 

1 
1 

^^  n 

'  ,    1 

I  1 

f,;; 

h^ 

L 

THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 

Christianity  grew.  It  was  a  natural  product.  It  did 
not  spring,  full-fledged,  from  any  one  man's  brain,  as 
Athene  sprang  from  the  head  of  Zeus.  It  was  not  even  in- 
vented by  any  little  group  or  school  of  men,  Petrine  or 
Pauline,  the  apostles  or  the  disciples,  the  early  church  of 
Jerusalem,  Antioch,  or  Alexandria.  Christianity  grew — 
slowly.  It  developed,  bit  by  bit,  for  three  long  centuries, 
taking  shape  by  gradual  stages  in  all  the  teeming  centres 
of  the  Roman  world  ;  and  even  after  it  had  assumed  a  con- 
sistent form  as  the  Holy  Catholic  Church,  it  still  went  on 
growing  in  the  minds  of  men,  with  a  growth  which  never 
ends,  but  which  reveals  itself  even  now  in  a  thousand 
modes,  from  a  Vatican  Council  to  the  last  new  departure 
of  the  last  new  group  of  American  sectaries. 

Christianity  grew — in  the  crowded  cosmopolitanised 
seaports  and  cities  of  the  Roman  empire — in  Antioch, 
Alexandria,  Thessalonica,  Cyrene,  Byzantium,  Rome.  Its 
highway  was  the  sea.  Though  partly  Jewish  in  origin,  it 
yet  appears  from  its  earliest  days  essentially  as  a  univer- 
sal and  international  religion.  Therefore  wc  may  gain 
some  approximate  knowledge  of  its  origin  and  antecedents 
by  considering  the  religious  condition  of  these  various 
great  towns  at  the  time  when  Christianity  began  to  spring 
spontaneous  in  their  midst.  We  can  arrive  at  some  idea 
of  the  product  itself  by  observing  the  environment  in  which 
it  was  evolved. 

Once    more,    Christianity    grew — for   the    most    part, 


I 


CHRISTIANITY  A  SYNCRE'UC  PRODUCT. 


0^1 


among  the  lower  orders  of  the  cosmopolitan  seaports.  It 
fashioned  itself  among  the  slaves,  the  freedmen,  the  Jew- 
ish, Syrian,  and  African  immigrants,  the  Druidical  Gauls 
and  Britons  of  Rome,  the  petty  shopkeepers,  the  pauper- 
ised clients,  the  babes  and  sucklings  of  the  populous  cen- 
tres. Hence,  while  based  upon  Judaism,  it  gathered  hos- 
pitably into  itself  all  those  elements  of  religious  thought 
and  religious  practice  that  were  common  to  the  whole 
world,  and  especially  to  the  Eastern  Mediterranean  basin. 
Furthermore,  it  gathered  hospitably  into  'tself  in  particu- 
lar those  elements  which  belonged  to  the  older  and  deeper- 
seated  part  of  the  popular  religions,  rather  than  those 
which  belonged  to  the  civilised,  Hellenised,  and  recognised 
modifications  of  the  state  religions.  It  was  a  democratic 
rather  than  an  official  product.  We  have  to  look,  there- 
fore, at  the  elder  far  more  than  the  younger  stratum  of  re- 
ligious thought  in  the  great  cities,  for  the  influences  which 
went  to  mould  Christianity.  I  do  not  deny,  indeed,  that 
the  new  faith  was  touched  and  tinged  in  all  its  higher  parts 
by  beautiful  influences  from  Neo-Platonism,  Alexandrian 
Judaism,  and  other  half-mystical  philosophic  systems;  but 
for  its  essential  groundwork  we  have  still  to  go  to  the  root- 
stratum  of  religious  practice  and  belief  in  Antioch  and  Al- 
exandria, in  Phrygia  and  Galatia,  in  Jerusalem  and  Rome. 
It  based  itself  above  all  on  sacrament,  sacrifice,  atonement, 
and  resurrection.  Yet  again,  Christianity  originated  first 
of  all  among  the  Jewish,  Syrian,  or  Semitic  population  of 
these  great  towns  of  the  empire,  at  the  very  moment  of  its 
full  cosmopolitanisation ;  it  spread  rapidly  from  them,  no 
doubt  at  first  with  serious  modifications,  to  the  mixed  mass 
of  sailors,  slaves,  freedwomen,  and  townspeople  who 
formed  apparently  its  earliest  adherents.  Hence,  we  must 
look  in  it  for  an  intimate  blend  of  Judaism  with  the  central 
ideas  of  the  popular  religions,  Aryan  or  Hamitic,  of  the 
Mediterranean  basin.  We  must  expect  in  it  much  that 
was  common  in  Syria,  Asia  Minor,  Hellas,  and  Egypt, — 
something  even  from  Gaul,  Hispania,  Carthage.     Its  first 


S 


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IMAGE  EVALUATION 
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364 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


great  apostle,  if  we  may  believe  our  authorities,  was  one 
Saul  or  Paul,  a  half-Hellenised  Jew  of  Semitic  and  com- 
mercial Tarsus  in  Cilicia,  and  a  Roman  citizen.  Its  first 
great  churches  sprang  up  in  the  busy  ports  and  marts  of 
the  Levant.  Its  very  name  of  Christian  was  given  to  it 
first  in  the  crowded  and  cosmopolitan  city  of  Antioch. 

It  is  here,  then,  in  these  huge  slave-peopled  hives  of 
Hellenised  and  Romanised  commerce,  that  we  must  look 
for  the  mother-ideas  of  Christianity. 

Antioch  was  quite  undoubtedly  in  the  earliest  times  the 
principal  cradle  of  the  new  religion.  I  do  not  mean  that 
Jerusalem  was  n•■^t  very  probably  the  place  where  men 
first  began  to  form  a  small  sect  of  esoteric  Christ-worship- 
pers, or  that  Galilee  was  not  the  region  where  the  Christ 
himself  most  largely  lived  and  taught,  if  indeed  such  a  per- 
son ever  really  existed.  In  those  matters  the  traditions 
handed  down  to  us  in  the  relatively  late  Gospels  may  be 
perfectly  correct  :  and  again,  they  may  not.  But  Chris- 
tianity as  we  know  it,  the  Christianity  of  the  Pauline  epis- 
tles and  the  later  writings,  such  as  the  Gospels  and  the 
works  of  the  Fathers,  must  have  been  essentially  a  cult  of 
wider  Syrian  and  Gentile  growth.  It  embraces  in  itself 
elements  which  doubtless  lingered  on  in  secluded  corners 
more  or  less  among  the  mass  of  the  people  even  in  Judaea 
itself,  though  discountenance'^  by  the  adherents  of  the 
priestly  and  official  Jahweh- worship;  but  which  were  inte- 
gral parts  of  the  popular  and  even  the  recognised  religion 
throughout  the  whole  of  northern  Syria. 

Antioch,  where  Christianity  thus  took  its  first  feeble 
st-^ps,  was  a  handsome  and  bustling  commercial  city,  the 
capital  of  the  Greek  Seleucid  kings,  and  the  acknowledged 
metropolis  of  the  Syrian  area.  At  the  time  of  Paul  (if 
there  was  a  Paul),  it  probably  contained  half  a  million 
people;  it  was  certainly  the  largest  town  in  Asia,  and 
worthy  to  be  compared  with  Rome  itself  in  the  splendour 
of  its  buildings.  Many  things  about  its  position  are  de- 
serving of  notice.    It  stood  upon  the  banks  of  the  Oron- 


BUDDHIST  INFLUENCES. 


365 


tes,  a  sacred  stream,  ensaonced  in  a  rich  agricultural 
plain,  fourteen  miles  from  the  river's  mouth.  Its  Ostia 
was  at  Selucia,  the  harbour  whence  flowed  the  entire  ex- 
port trade  of  Syria  and  the  east  towards  Hellas  and  Italy. 
The  Mediterranean  in  front  connected  it  with  Rome, 
Alexandria,  Asia  Minor,  Greece;  the  caravan  routes  across 
the  Syrian  desert  in  the  rear  put  it  in  communication  with 
the  bazars  of  Mesopotamia  and  the  remoter  east.  It  was 
thus  the  main  entrepot  of  the  through  trade  between  two 
important  worlds.  The  Venice  of  its  time,  it  lay  at  the 
focal  point  where  the  highroads  of  Europe  and  of  Asia 
converged. 

Scholars  of  repute  have  pointed  out  the  fact  that  even 
earlier  than  the  days  of  Paul,  Buddhist  ideas  from  India 
seem  to  have  dribbled  through  and  affected  the  Syrian 
world,  as  Zoroastrian  ideas  a  little  later  dribbled  through 
and  affected  the  thought  of  Alexandria:  and  some  im- 
portance has  been  attached  to  this  infiltration  of  mo- 
tives from  the  mystical  east.  Now,  I  do  not  care  to  deny 
that  budding  Christianity  may  have  been  much  influ- 
enced on  its  ritual  and  still  more  on  its  ethical  side  by 
floating  elements  of  Buddhist  opinion:  that  the  infancy  of 
the  Christ  may  have  been  nursed  by  the  Magi.  But  on  the 
whole  I  think  the  facts  we  have  just  been  considering  as 
to  the  manufacture  of  artificial  human  gods  and  the  nature 
and  meaning  of  piacular  sacrifices  will  suffice  to  show  that 
Christianity  was  chiefly  a  plant  of  home  growth.  The  na- 
tive soil  contained  already  every  essential  element  that 
was  needed  to  feed  it — the  doctrine  of  the  Incarnation,  the 
death  of  the  Man-God,  the  atoning  power  of  his  Blood, 
the  Resurrection  and  Ascension.  So  that,  while  allowing 
due  weight  to  this  peculiar  international  position  of  An- 
tioch,  as  the  double-faced  Janus-gate  of  Europe  at  id  Asia, 
I  am  not  inclined  to  think  that  points  peculiar  to  Bud- 
dhism need  have  exercised  any  predominant  influence  in 
the  evolution  of  the  new  religion.  For  we  must  remember 
that  Buddhism  itself  did  but  subsume  into  its  own  fabric 


■'•:.,  I  ^ 


I 


I 


I       r 


366 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


ideas  which  were  common  to  Peru  and  Mexico,  to  Greece 
and  India,  to  Syria  and  Egypt,  and  which  came  out  in 
fresh  forms,  surging  up  from  below,  in  the  creed  of  Chris- 
tendom. If  anything  is  clear  from  our  previous  re- 
searches it  is  this — that  the  world  has  never  really  had 
more  than  one  religion — "of  many  names,  a  single  central 
shape,"  as  the  poet  phrases  it. 

The  Syrian  people,  Semites  by  race  and  cult,  had  fallen, 
like  all  the  rest  of  the  eastern  world,  under  the  Hellenic 
dominion  of  the  successors  of  Alexander.  A  quick  and 
subtle  folk,  very  pliable  and  plastic,  they  underwent  rapid 
and  facile  Hellenisation.  It  was  an  easy  task  for  them  to 
accept  Greek  culture  and  Greek  religion.  The  worshipper 
of  Adonis  had  little  difficulty  in  renaming  his  chief  god  as 
Dionysus  and  continuing  to  practise  his  old  rites  and  cere- 
monies to  the  newly-named  deity  after  the  ancestral  pat- 
tern. The  Astarte  whom  the  east  had  given  to  Hellas 
under  the  alias  of  Aphrodite,  came  back  again  as  Aphro- 
dite to  Astarte's  old  sanctuaries.  Identiications  of  gods 
and  cults  were  but  simple  matters,  where  so  many  gods 
were  after  all  essentially  similar  in  origin  and  function. 
Thus  the  easy-going  Syrian  had  few  scruples  about  prac- 
tising his  primitive  ceremonies  under  foreign  titles,  or  ad- 
mitting to  the  hospitality  of  his  Semitic  temples  the  Hel- 
lenic deities  of  the  reigning  Antiochi. 

The  Seleucids,  however,  did  not  fare  so  well  in  their  at- 
tempt to  impose  the  alien  gods  on  the  fierce  Jehovistic 
zealots  of  the  southern  mountains.  Antiochus  IV.  en- 
deavoured in  vain  to  force  the  cults  of  intrusive  Hellenism 
on  his  new  kingdom  of  Palestine.  He  reckoned  without 
his  hosts.  The  populace  of  Jerusalem  would  not  away 
with  his  "idolatrous"  rites — would  not  permit  the  worship 
of  Zeus  and  Pallas,  of  Artemis  and  Aphrodite,  to  usurp  a 
place  in  the  holy  city  of  Jahweh.  The  rebellion  of  the 
Maccabees  secured  at  least  the  religious  independence  of 
Judaea  from  the  early  Seleucid  period  down  to  the  days  of 
Vespasian  and  Titus.    Lower  Syria  remained  true  in  her 


SYRIAN  INFLUENCES. 


Z^7 


arid  hills  to  the  exclusive  and  monotheistic  cult  of  the  God 
of  Israel.  And  at  the  same  time  the  Jew  spread  every- 
where over  the  surrounding  countries,  carrying  with  him 
not  only  his  straw  and  his  basket,  but  also  his  ingrained 
and  ineradicable  prejudices. 

In  Antioch,  then,  after  the  Roman  absorption  of  Syria, 
a  most  cosmopolitan  religion  appears  to  have  existed,  con- 
taining mingled  Semitic  and  Hellenic  elements,  half  as- 
similated to  one  another,  in  a  way  that  was  highly  charac- 
teristic of  the  early  empire.  And  among  the  popular  cults 
of  the  great  city  we  must  certainly  place  high  those  of 
Adonis  and  Dionysus,  of  Aphroditc-Astarte,  and  of  the 
local  gods  or  goddesses,  the  Baalim  and  Ashtareth,  such 
as  the  maiden  who,  as  we  learnt  from  Malalas,  was  sacri- 
ficed at  the  original  foundation  of  the  city,  and  ever  after 
worshipped  as  its  Tyche  or  Fortune.  In  other  words,  the 
conception  of  the  human  god,  of  the  corn  and  wine  god, 
of  the  death  of  the  god,  and  of  his  glorious  resurrection, 
must  have  all  been  perfectly  familiar  ideas  to  the  people  of 
Antioch  and  of  Syria  in  general. 

Let  us  note  here,  too,  that  the  particular  group  of  Jah- 
weh-worshippers  among  whom  the  Christ  is  said  to  have 
found  his  personal  followers,  were  not  people  of  the 
priestly  type  of  Jerusalem,  but  Galilaean  peasants  of  the 
northern  mountains,  separated  from  the  most  orthodox 
set  of  Jews  by  the  intrusive  wedge  of  heretical  Samari- 
tans, and  closely  borderinf  on  the  heathen  Phoenician  sea- 
board— "  the  coasts  of  Tyre  and  Sidon."  Here  Judaism 
and  heathenism  marched  together;  here  Jahweh  had  his 
worshippers  among  the  fishers  of  the  lake,  while  Hellenism 
had  fixed  itself  in  the  statelier  villas  of  Tiberias  and  Ptole- 
mais. 

Alexandria  v/as  another  of  the  great  cosmopolitan  sea- 
port towns  where  Christianity  made  its  earliest  converts, 
and  assumed  not  a  few  of  its  distinctive  tenets.  Now, 
in  Alexandria,  Hellenism  and  the  immemorially  ancient 
Egyptian  religion  found  themselves  face  to  face  at  very 


'•1 


I'M  .1   V  "^ 


w 


I 

;  1 


368 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


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close  quarters.  It  is  true,  the  town  in  its  historical  aspect 
was  mainly  Greek,  founded  by  the  great  Macedonian  him- 
self, and  priding  itself  on  its  pure  Hellenic  culture.  But 
the  mass  of  the  lower  orders  who  throng  id  its  alleys  must 
surely  have  consisted  of  more  or  less  mongrel  Egyptians, 
still  clinging  with  all  the  old  Egyptian  conservatism  to  the 
ideas  and  practices  and  rites  of  their  fathers.  Besides 
these,  we  get  hints  of  a  large  cosmopolitan  seafaring  popu- 
lation, among  whom  strange  faiths  and  exotic  gods  found 
ready  acceptance.  Beside  the  stately  forms  of  the  Greek 
pantheon,  and  the  mummified  or  animal-headed  Egyp- 
tian deities,  the  imported  Syrian  worship  of  Adonis  had 
acquired  a  firm  footing;  the  annual  festival  of  the  slaugh- 
tered god  was  one  of  the  principal  holidays;  and  other  Sy- 
rian or  remoter  faiths  had  managed  to  secure  their  special 
following.  The  hybrid  Serapis  occupied  the  stateliest  fane 
of  the  hybrid  city.  In  that  huge  and  busy  hive,  indeed, 
every  form  of  cult  found  a  recognised  place,  and  every 
creed  was  tolerated  which  did  not  inculcate  interference 
with  the  equal  religious  freedom  of  others. 

The  Ptolemaic  family  represents  in  itself  this  curious 
adaptability  of  the  Graeco-Egyptian  Alexandrian  mind. 
At  Alexandria  and  in  the  Delta,  the  kings  appear  before  us 
as  good  Hellenes,  worshipping  their  ancestral  deities  in 
splendid  temples;  but  in  the  Thebaid,  the  god  Ptolemy  or 
the  goddess  Cleopatra  erected  buildings  in  honor  of  Ptah 
or  Khem  in  precisely  the  old  Egyptian  style,  and  appeared 
on  their  propyla  in  the  guise  of  Pharaohs  engaged  in  wor- 
shipping Amen-Ra  or  Osiris.  The  great  Alexander  him- 
self had  inaugurated  this  system  when  he  gave  himself  out 
as  the  son  of  "  Zeus  Ammon  ";  and  his  indirect  representa- 
tives carried  it  on  throughout  v/ith  a  curious  dualism 
which  excused  itself  under  the  veil  of  arbitrary  identifica- 
tions. Thus  Serapis  himself  was  the  dead  Apis  bull,  in- 
vested with  the  attributes  of  an  Osiris  and  of  the  Hellenic 
Hades  ;  while  Amen-Ra  was  Zeus  in  an  Egyptian  avatar. 

The  large  Jewish  colony  at  Alexandria  also  prepared  the 


.♦i 


EGYPTIAN  INFLUENCES. 


369 


way  for  the  ultimate  admixture  of  Neo-Platonism  in  the 
Christian  faith;  while  the  Egyptian  belief  in  Triads  of  gods 
formed  the  groundwork  for  the  future  doctrine  of  the 
Trinity,  so  doggedly  battled  for  by  the  Alexandrian  Atha- 
nasius.  It  is  true  that  Ampere  and  Preller  have  strenu- 
ously denied  any  Egyptian  admixture  in  the  philosophy 
of  Alexandria;  and  their  reasoning  may  be  conclusive 
enough  as  to  the  upper  stratum  of  thought :  but  it  must  at 
least  be  admitted  that  popular  belief  in  the  city  of  the 
Ptolemies  must  have  been  deeply  coloured  by  the  ideas 
'ind  creeds  of  its  Egyptian  substratum.  Now,  in  the 
growth  of  Christianity,  it  was  the  people  who  counted,  not 
the  official  classes,  the  learned,  or  the  philosophic.  We 
must  not  attribute  to  the  population  of  the  East  End 
of  London  the  theology  of  Pusey  or  the  evolutionism  of 
Herbert  Spencer. 

Christianity  would  seem  also  to  have  taken  part  at  least 
of  its  form  in  Rome.  And  as  Roman  influence  extended 
likewise  over  every  portion  of  the  vast  empire,  I  must  say 
a  very  few  words  here  about  the  origin  and  growth  of  the 
Roman  religion. 

That  religion,  as  it  comes  upon  us  in  the  few  glimpses 
we  get  of  its  early  Italic  and  pre-Hellenised  form,  was  one 
of  the  rudest  and  most  primitive  type,  almost  savage  in  its 
extreme  simplicity.  It  knew  hardly  any  great  gods  by 
name:  the  few  deities  it  possessed,  it  expressed  only  for  the 
most  part  by  adjectival  names.  Few,  I  say,  as  to  type,  for 
as  to  number  of  individuals,  their  name  indeed  was  legion; 
they  pervaded  the  whole  world  in  that  reckless  multi- 
plicity which  distinguishes  the  simple  ghosts  or  spirits  of 
early  hunting  or  pastoral  peoples.  With  the  Romans,  this 
multiplicity,  ubiquity,  and  vagueness  survived  into  a 
relatively  settled  and  civilised  agricultural  condition.  A 
vast  number  of  small  department?!  gods,  with  few  or  no 
great  ones — that  is  the  first  state  of  the  Roman  pantheon. 

The  central  point  of  old  Roman  religion  was  clearly 
the  household;  the  family  ghosts  or  lares  were  the  most 


',1  ' 


370 


THR  fl'ORLD  BFFORP.  CHRIST. 


,   '.  I 


|( 


i  i 


Iff  -  flj::e.'h' 


f! 


;^'i      f!; 


,! 


f 


I 


honoured  gods.  We  may  instructively  compare  Mr.  Chal- 
mers's account  of  the  theology  of  New  Guinea.  Beside 
these  ancestral  shades,  or  almost  identical  with  them,  came 
the  paiatcs  or  practical  deities  of  the  store-room,  perhaps 
the  representatives  of  the  victims  slain  as  foundation- 
ghosts  at  the  tirst  erection  of  the  huilding.  v3f  these  two, 
the  Lares  were  undoubtedly  the  departed  ancestors  of  the 
family;  they  lived  near  the  spot  where  they  wer?  first 
buried  (for  the  old  Romans  were  buriers),  and  they  still 
presided  over  the  household  as  in  life,  like  its  fathers  and 
senators.  They  were  worshipped  daily  with  prayers 
and  simple  offerings  of  food  and  drink;  their  masks  or 
busts  which  hung  on  the  wall  were  perhaps  the  represen- 
tatives, or  in  ancient  days  the  coverings,  of  the  old  oracu- 
lar heads  or  skulls;  for  the  skulls, themselves  may  have 
been  preserved  in  wax,  as  so  often  elsewhere  at  an  earlier 
period.*  The  Penates,  which  were  worshipped  with  the 
Lares,  seem  to  have  stood  for  the  family  spirit  in  a  more 
generalised  way;  they  represent  the  continuity  and  per- 
sistence of  its  Fortune;  and  therefore,  if  we  may  trust  the 
analogy  of  the  Fortune  of  a  town,  they  are  probably  the 
ghosts  of  the  foundation  or  renewal  victims.  In  judging 
of  all  this,  we  cannot  attach  too  great  importance  to  the 
analogy  of  Negritto  and  Polynesian  customs. 

Other  deities  are  more  public.  But  mcat  of  them  seem 
to  belong  to  the  simplest  and  most  immediately  ghost-like 
stratum.  They  had  to  do  with  sowing,  reaping,  and 
vintage — in  other  words,  were  corn  or  wine  gods.  Or 
else  they  had  to  do  with  the  navigable  river,  the  Tiber,  and 
the  port  of  Ostia,  which  lay  at  its  mouth — in  other  words, 
were  spring  and  river  gods.  Or  else  they  had  to  do  with 
war  and  expeditions — in  other  words  were  slaughtered 
campaign  gods  of  the  Iphigenia  pattern,  Bellonas  and  bat- 
tle-victims. 

*  To  this  use  of  the  oracular  head  I  would  venture  also  to  refer  the 
common  employment  of  small  masks  as  amulets :  an  employment 
which,  as  Bnttifter  rij;:  tly  remarks,  explains  "  the  vast  number  of  such 
subjects  met  with  in  a  .lique  gems." 


■\\. 


ROM. IN   INIIAI'.NCr.S. 


.^7« 


seem 

t-like 
and 
Or 
and 

ords, 
with 

tered 
bal- 


er the 
yment 
i  such 


Anion};  tliis  dim  crowd  of  cider  niannfactnrcd  deities, 
Saturiuis,  the  sowinj;  };od,  was  most  hkely  an  amuial  coni- 
victim;  his  adjectival  name  by  itself  sugj^ests  lliat  conchi- 
sion.  Terminus,  tlie  boundary  ^od,  is  ah-eady  familiar  to 
us.  A!)out  these  two  at  least  we  can  hartUy  be  mistaken. 
A  red-haired  man  (as  in  ICjjypt)  no  doubt  preceded  as 
yearly  corn-victim  the  red-haired  puppies  still  slauj^htercd 
for  the  crops  within  the  ken  of  Festus.  Seia,  Sej^etia, 
Tutilina,  the  successive  corn-deities,  we  have  already  con- 
sidered. They  seem  lO  e(|uate  with  the  successive  mai- 
dens slain  for  the  corn  in  other  communities,  and  still  com- 
memorated in  our  midst  by  the  corn-baby  and  the  corn- 
wife.  At  each  st.ige  of  ajjc  in  the  corn,  a  eorrespondinj; 
stage  in  the  age  of  the  human  victim  was  considered 
desirable.  But  how  reconcile  this  idea  with  the  existence 
of  numerous  petty  functional  deities — gods  of  the  door 
and  the  hinge  ? — with  the  Cunina  who  guards  the  child  in 
the  cradle,  and  the  Statina  who  takes  care  of  him  when  he 
begins  to  stand  ?  I  answer,  all  these  are  but  adjectival 
gods,  mere  ghosts  or  spirits,  unknown  in  themselves,  but 
conceived  as  exercising  this  particular  function.  "  The 
god  that  does  so-and-so  "  is  just  a  convenient  expression, 
no  more;  it  serves  its  purpose,  and  that  was  enough  for 
the  practical  Roman.  How  readily  they  could  put  up 
with  these  rough-and-ready  identifications  we  know  in  the 
case  of  Aius  Locutius  and  of  the  Deus  RedicuUis. 

Each  Terminus  and  each  Silvanus  is  thus  the  god  or 
protecting  ghost  of  each  boundary  stone  or  each  sacred 
grove — not  a  proper  name,  but  a  class — not  a  particular 
god,  but  a  kind  of  spirit.  The  generalised  and  abstract 
gods  are  later  unifications  of  all  the  individuals  included 
in  each  genus.  The  Janus,  I  take  it,  was  at  first  the  victim 
once  sacrificed  annually  before  each  gate  of  the  city,  as  he 
is  sacrificed  still  on  the  west  coast  of  Africa:  as  the  god  of 
opening,  he  was  slaughtered  at  the  opening  of  every  new 
year;  and  the  year  conversely  opened  its  course  with  the 
month  sacred  to  the  god  of  opening.     Perhaps  he  was  also 


'^'.'1 


^w 


■  I    'I 


I    • 


'ill   ' 


!  1; 


372 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


slain  as  fortune  at  the  beginning  of  each  war.  The  Vesta 
is  the  hearth-goddess  ;  and  every  house  had  its  Vesta  ; 
perhaps  originally  a  slaughtered  hearth-victim.  Every 
man  had  in  like  manner  his  Genias,  an  ancestral  protect- 
ing spirit;  the  corresponding  guardian  of  the  woman  was 
her  Juno;  they  descend  to  Christianity,  especially  in  its 
most  distinctive  Roman  form,  as  the  guardian  angels. 
Mars  was  a  corn-spirit;  only  later  was  he  identified  with 
the  expeditionary  god.  His  annual  expulsion  as  the 
human  scapegoat  has  already  been  considered.  The 
Jupiter  or  Jovis  was  a  multiple  wine-god,  doubtless  in 
every  case  the  annual  victim  slain,  Dionysus-wise,  for  the 
benefit  of  the  vineyard.  Each  village  and  each  farm  had 
once  its  Jovis,  specially  worshipped,  and,  I  doubt  not, 
originally  slaughtered,  at  the  broaching  of  the  year's  first 
wine-cask  in  April.  But  his  name  shows  that,  as  usual, 
he  was  also  identified  with  that  very  ancient  Sky-god  who 
is  common  to  all  the  A»yan  race;  the  particular  Jovi;^ 
being  probably  sacrificed,  himself  to  himself,  before  the  old 
Sky-god's  altar,  as  elsewhere  the  Dionysus-victim  at  the 
shrine  of  Dionysus. 

These  identifications,  I  know,  may  sound  fanciful  to 
mere  classical  scholars,  unacquainted  with  the  recent  ad- 
vances in  anthropology,  and  I  would  not  have  ventured 
to  propound  them  at  an  earlier  sta  je  of  our  involved  argu- 
ment; but  now  that  we  have  seen  and  learned  to  recog- 
nise the  extraordinary  similarity  of  all  pantheons  the 
whole  world  over,  I  think  the  exact  way  these  deities  fall 
into  line  with  the  wall-gods,  gate-gods,  corn-gods,  wine- 
gods,  boundary-gods,  forest-gods,  fountain-gods,  and 
river-gods  everywhere  else  must  surely  be  allowed  some 
little  weight  in  analogically  placing  them. 

The  later  Roman  religion  only  widens,  if  at  all,  from 
within  its  own  rang?,  by  the  inclusion  of  larger  and  larger 
tribal  elements.  Thus  the  Deus  Fidius,  who  presided  over 
each  separate  alliance,  I  take  to  be  the  ghost  of  the  victim 
slain  to  form  a  covenant;  just  as  in  Africa  to  this  day, 


THE  OLD  ROMAN  RELIGION. 


373 


"when  two  tribes  have  concluded  a  treaty  of  peace,  they 
crucify  a  slave  "  to  ratify  the  bargain."  The  nature  of 
such  covenant  victims  has  been  well  illustrated  by  Profes- 
sor Robertson  Smith,  but  the  growth  of  the  covenant-gods, 
who  finally  assumed  very  wide  importance,  is  a  subject 
which  considerations  of  space  prevent  mc  from  including 
in  our  present  purview.  The  victim,  at  first  no  doubt 
human,  became  later  a  theanthropic  animal;  as  did  also 
the  Jovis-victim  and  the  representatives  of  the  other  ad- 
jectival or  departmental  deities.  The  Roman  Mars  and 
the  Sabine  Quirinus  may  readily  have  been  amalgamated 
into  a  Mars  Quirinus,  if  we  remember  that  Mars  is  pro- 
bably a  general  name,  and  that  any  number  of  Martes  may 
at  any  time  have  been  sacrificed.  The  Jovis  of  the  city  of 
Rome  thus  comes  at  last  to  be  the  greatest  and  most 
powerful  Jupiter  of  them  all,  and  the  representative  of  the 
Roman  union.  Under  Hellenising  influences,  however, 
all  these  minor  gods  get  elevated  at  last  into  generalised 
deities;  and  the  animal  victims  offered  to  them  become 
mere  honorific  or  piacular  sacrifices,  hardly  identified  at 
all  with  the  great  images  who  receive  them. 

The  Hellenising  process  went  so  far,  indeed,  at  Rome 
that  the  old  Roman  religion  grew  completely  obscured, 
and  almost  disappeared,  save  in  its  domestic  character.  In 
the  home,  the  Lares  still  held  the  first  rank.  Elsewhere, 
Bacchuk  took  the  place  of  Liber,  while  the  traits  of 
Hermes  were  fastened  on  the  adjectival  Roman  bargain- 
spirit  Mercurius.  Yet  even  so,  the  Roman  retained  his 
primitive  belief  in  com  and  wine  gods,  under  the  newer 
guises;  his  Ceres  he  saw  as  one  with  the  Attic  Demeter; 
his  rural  ceremonies  still  continued  unchanged  by  the 
change  of  attributes  that  infected  and  transfigured  the  city 
temples.  Moreover,  the  Romans,  and  later  the  cosmo- 
politan population  of  Rome,  borrowed  gods  and  goddesses 
freely  from  without  in  ever  increasing  numbers.  In  very 
early  days,  they  borrowed  from  Etruria;  later,  they  bor- 
rowed  Apollo  from   Greece,   and   (by   an   etymological 


^H 


■  «  ", 


''iS 


if     I 


.  I.  (     ; 


(kill! 


■•  'U   \ 


I    I'M 


)   ■ 


M    i 


)    t 


■  ! 

r  1 

*  '  ?  i 

!    i::\ 

t 

M- 

; 
; 

:|!l! 

,  1  ■ 

L 

1 

I 

'   r 

1         i 

374 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST. 


blunder)  fixed  upon  their  own  Hercules  the  traits  of 
Heracles.  On  the  occasion  of  a  plague,  they  publicly 
summoned  Asclepios,  the  Greek  leech-god,  from  Epi- 
daurus;  and  at  the  very  crisis  of  the  life-and-death  con- 
flict with  Hannibal,  they  fetched  the  sacred  field-stone 
known  as  Cybele,  the  Mother  of  the  Gods,  from  Pessinus 
in  Phrygia.  The  people  of  Pessinus  with  strange  com- 
pliance let  thei«"  goddess  go;  and  the  whole  orgiastic  cult 
of  Attis  was  thus  transported  entire  to  Italian  soil.  The 
rites  of  the  great  festival  were  carried  on  at  Rome  almost 
as  they  had  been  carried  on  before  in  Phrygia;  so  that  an 
Asiatic  worship  of  the  most  riotous  type  found  a  firm 
offioial  footing  in  the  centre  of  the  empire.  The  priest,  in- 
deed, was  still  an  Asiatic,  or  at  least  not  a  Roman;  but  the 
expulsion  of  Hannibal  from  Italy  which  followed  on  this 
adoption  of  a  foreign  god,  must  have  greatly  increased 
the  prestige  and  reputation  of  the  alien  and  orgiastic  deity. 

The  luxurious  Aphrodite  of  Eryx  in  Sicily  arrived  in 
Rome  about  the  same  time  with  Cybele.  Originally  a 
Semitic  goddess,  she  combined  the  Hellenic  and  oriental 
ideas,  and  was  identified  in  Italy  with  the' old  Latin  Venus. 

Later  still,  yet  other  gods  were  imported  from  without. 
New  deities  flowed  in  from  Asia  and  Africa.  The  popula- 
tion of  the  city  under  the  early  empire  had  almost  ceased 
to  be  Roman,  save  in  the  upper  strata;  a  vast  number  of 
slaves  from  all  parts  of  the  world  formed  the  lowest  layer 
in  the  crowded  vaults:  the  middle  rank  was  filled  by 
Syrians,  Africans,  Greeks,  Sicilians,  Moors,  and  freedmen 
— men  of  all  places  and  races  from  Spain  or  Britain  to  the 
Euphrates  and  the  Nile,  the  steppes  and  the  desert.  The 
Orontes,  said  Juvenal,  had  flooded  the  Tiber.  Among 
this  mixed  mass  of  all  creeds  and  colours,  subfusk  or 
golden-haired,  a  curious  mixture  of  religions  grew  up. 
Some  of  these  were  mere  ready-made  foreign  importations 
— Isis- worship  from  Egypt;  Jahweh- worship  from  Judaea; 
strange  eastern  or  northern  or  African  cults  from  the  re- 
motest parts  of  Pontus  or  Mauritania.      Others   were 


COSMOPOLITANISM  OP  THE  EMPIRE. 


375 


intermixtures  or  rationalisations  of  older  religions,  such 
as  Christianity,  which  mingled  together  Judaism  and 
Adonis  or  Osiris  elements;  such  as  Gnosticism,  which, 
starting  from  Zoroastrian  infiltrations,  kneaded  all  the 
gods  of  the  world  at  last  into  its  own  supreme  mystic  and 
magic-god  Abraxas. 

Looking  a  little  deeper  through  the  empire  in  general, 
we  see  that  from  the  time  of  Augustus  onward,  the  need 
for  a  new  cosmopolitan  religion,  to  fit  the  new  cosmopoli- 
tan state,  was  beginning  to  be  dimly  felt  and  acknow- 
ledged. Soldiers,  enlisted  in  one  country,  took  the  cult 
and  images  of  their  gods  to  another.  The  bull-slaying 
Mithra  (in  whom  we  can  hardly  fail  to  see  a  solar  form 
of  the  bull-god,  who  sacrifices  a  bull,  himself  to  him- 
self, before  his  own  altar)  was  worshipped  here  and  there, 
as  numerous  bas-reliefs  show,  from  Persia  to  Britain.  The 
Gaul  endeavoured  to  identify  his  own  local  war-gods  with 
the  Roman  Mars,  who  had  been  Hellenised  in  turn  in*^o 
the  duplicate  presentment  of  the  Greek  Ares.  The  Briton 
saw  his  river-gods  remodelled  in  mosaic  into  images  like 
those  of  Roman  Tiber,  or  provided  with  the  four  horses 
who  drag  the  Roman  Neptune,  as  Neptune  had  borrowed 
the  representation  at  least  from  the  Greek  Poseidon. 
And  this  was  all  the  easier  because  v  v^erywhere  alike  horses 
were  sacrificed  to  sea  or  river,  in  lieu  of  human  victims; 
just  as  everywhere  corn-gods  were  dressed  in  green,  and 
everywhere  wine-gods  wore  coronals  of  vine-leases  on 
their  holy  foreheads.  Men  felt  the  truth  I  have  tried  to 
impress,  that  everywhere  and  always  there  is  but  one  re- 
ligion. Attributes  and  origin  were  so  much  aHke  that 
worship  was  rapidly  undergoing  a  cosmopolitanisation  of 
name,  as  it  already  possessed  a  similarity  of  rites  and 
underlyinf^  features  Language  itself  assisted  this  uni- 
fying^ proct  s.  In  the  west,  as  Latin  spread,  Latin  names 
of  ;ods  su  erseded  l<-i*cal  ones  ;  in  the  cast,  as  Greek 
spread,  Helle.  c  deities  gave  their  titles  and  their  beautiful 
forms  to  nati\e  images.      An  artificial  unity  was  intro- 


w^^ 


El  t^ 


'i' 

J 

I  • 

'.■,.       '1 

!■ 

'  '■,         % 

M 

'■  '         \ 

•!): 

iH  ■  I; 


'r 


'■•■  :■!- 


J/  ^-  il|ll^?!ii 


^■'  ,■. 


f    ..  .  ■  i 


JS^    .^ 


i    ■  ;^^^  'i 


r't|v  ;!■ 


376 


THE  WORLD  BEFORE  CHRIST 


ti ,:  i ' 


duced  and  fixed  by  a  conventional  list  of  Greek  and 
Roman  equivalents;  and  in  the  west,  as  Greek  art  gained 
ground  and  spread,  noble  Greek  representations  of  the 
higher  gods  in  ideal  human  form  became  everywhere 
common. 

But  that  was  not  enough.  As  the  government  was  one, 
under  a  strong  centralised  despotism,  it  was  but  natural 
that  the  religion  should  be  one  also,  under  the  rule  of  a 
similar  omnipotent  deity.  Man  makes  his  heaven  in  the 
image  of  earth;  his  pantheon  answers  to  his  political  con- 
stitution. The  mediaeval  hall  of  heaven  had  an  imperial 
God,  like  the  Othos  or  the  Fredericks,  on  his  regal 
throne,  surrounded  by  a  court  of  great  barons  and  abbots 
in  the  angels  and  archangels,  the  saints  and  martyrs:  the 
new  religions,  like  spiritualism  and  Theosophy,  which 
spring  up  in  the  modern  democratic  world,  are  religions 
of  free  and  independent  spirits,  hardly  even  theistic.  The 
Roman  empire  thus  demanded  a  single  religion  under  a 
single  strong  god.  It  tended  to  find  it,  if  not  in  the 
Genius  of  Trajan  or  Antonine,  then  in  some  bull-slaying 
Mithra  or  some  universal  Abraxas.  Materialists  were  sa- 
tisfied with  the  worship  of  the  Emperor  or  of  the  city  of 
Rome:  idealists  turned  rather  to  Isis  or  to  Christ. 

One  religion  there  was  which  might  have  answered 
the  turn  of  the  empire:  the  pure  and  ideal  monotheism 
of  Judaea.  But  the  cult  of  Jahweh  was  too  local  and  too 
national;  it  never  extended  beyond  the  real  or  adopted 
sons  of  Israel.  Even  so,  it  gained  proselytes  of  high  rank 
a<^  Rome,  especially  among  women;  as  regards  men,  the 
painful  and  degrading  initiatory  ceremony  of  Judaism 
must  always  have  stood  seriously  in  the  way  of  converts. 
Yet  in  spite  of  this  drawback,  there  were  proselytes  in  all 
the  cosmopolitan  cities  where  the  Jews  were  settled;  men 
who  loved  their  nation  and  had  built  them  a  synagogue. 
If  Judaism  could  but  get  rid  of  its  national  exclusiveness, 
and  could  incorporate  into  its  god  some  more  of  those 
genial  and  universal  traits  which  he  had  too  early  shuffled 


^  ;.l 


■■■■M 


CHRISTIANITY  FILLS  THE  GAP. 


177 


off — if  it  could  make  itself  less  austere,  less  abstract,  and 
at  the  same  time  less  local — there  was  a  chance  that  it 
might  rise  to  be  the  religion  of  humanity.  The  dream  of 
the  prophets  might  still  come  true  and  all  the  world  might 
draw  nigh  to  Zion. 

At  this  critical  juncture,  an  obscure  little  sect  began  to 
appear  among  the  Jews  and  Galilaeans,  in  Jerusalem  and 
Antioch,  which  happened  to  combine  in  a  remarkable  de- 
gree all  the  main  requirements  of  a  new  world-religion. 
And  whatever  the  cult  of  Jesus  lacked  in  this  respect  in  its 
first  beginnings,  it  made  up  for  as  it  went  by  absorption 
and  permeation. 

It  was  a  Catholic  Church:  it  stood  for  the  world,  not  for 
a  tribe  or  a  nation.  It  was  a  Holy  Church:  it  laid  great 
stress  upon  the  ethical  element.  It  was  a  Roman  Church: 
it  grew  and  prospered  throughout  the  Roman  empire.  It 
made  a  city  what  was  once  a  world.  Whence  it  came  and 
how  it  grew  must  be  our  next  and  final  questions. 


•^^mi 


NM 


378 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY 


't  I 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 


THE  GROWTH   OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


!  '  M 


I    :  "  .1:1 


,ii^.;.. 


While  the  world  was  thus  seething  and  fermenting 
with  new  faiths  the  creed  of  the  Christ  made  its  first  ap- 
pearance on  the  seaboard  of  Asia.  In  spite  of  certain 
remarks  in  my  first  chapter,  I  am  not  such  a  "  gross  and 
crass  Euhemerist  "  as  to  insist  dogmatically  on  the  histori- 
cal existence  of  a  personal  Jesus.  Of  the  Christ  himself, 
if  a  Christ  there  were,  we  know  little  or  nothing.  The 
account  of  his  life  which  has  come  down  to  us  in  the  Gos- 
pels is  so  devoid  of  authority,  and  so  entirely  built  u)  of 
miraculous  fragments,  derived  from  elsewhere,  that  we 
may  well  be  excused  for  gravely  doubting  whether  he  is 
not  rather  to  be  numbered  with  St.  George  and  St.  Cathe- 
rine, with  Perseus  and  Arthur,  among  the  wholly  mythical 
and  imaginary  figures  of  legend  and  religion. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  quite  possible,  or  even  proba- 
ble, that  there  really  did  live  in  Galilee,  at  some  time  about 
the  beginning  of  our  accepted  era,  a  teacher  and  reformer 
bearing  the  Semitic  name  which  is  finally  Hellenised  and 
Latinised  for  us  as  Jesus.  If  so,  it  seems  not  unlikely  that 
this  unknown  person  was  crucified  (or  rather  hung  on  a 
post)  by  the  Romans  at  Jerusalem  under  the  Procurator 
C.  Pontius  Pilatus;  and  that  after  his  death  he  was  wor- 
shipped more  or  less  as  a  god  by  his  immediate  followers. 
Such  kernel  of  truth  may  very  well  exist  in  the  late  and  de- 
rivative Gospel  story;  a  kernel  of  truth,  but  imbedded  in  a 
mass  of  unhistorical  myth,  which  implicitly  identifies  him 
with  all  the  familiar  corn-gods  and  wine-gods  of  the  East- 
ern Mediterranean. 


■  f ;  i ' 


THE  CHRIST  A   TEMPORARY  KING. 


379 


Furthermore,  it  is  even  possible  that  the  Christ  may  have 
been  deliberately  put  to  death,  at  the  instigation  of  the 
Jewish  rabble,  as  one  of  those  temporary  divine  kings 
whose  nature  and  meaning  we  have  already  discussed.  If 
this  suggestion  seem  improbable  from  the  lack  of  any 
similar  recorded  case  in  the  scanty  Jewish  annals,  I  would 
answer  that  formal  histories  seldom  give  us  any  hint  of  the 
similar  customs  still  surviving  in  civilised  European  coun- 
tries; that  many  popular  rites  exist  unheard  of  everywhere; 
and  that  the  Jews  were  commonly  believed  through  the 
Middle  Ages  to  crucify  Christian  boys,  like  St.  Hugh  of 
Lincoln,  in  certain  irregular  and  unrecognised  ethnical 
ceremonies.  Furthermore,  lest  I  should  be  thought  to 
adduce  this  instance  through  an  anti-Semite  tendency 
(which  I  do  not  in  the  slightest  degree  possess),  I  may  add 
that  even  among  Christians  similar  customs  are  believed  to 
exist  in  rural  parts  of  Italy  at  the  present  day, — there  are 
villages  where  a  man  dies  yearly  as  the  representative  of 
Christ;  and  that  in  my  opinion  the  Oberammergau  and 
other  Passion  Plays  are  survivals  of  like  representations  in 
which  a  condemned  criminal,  the  usual  substitute,  did  once 
actually  enact  the  part  of  Christ.  In  short,  I  do  not  hesi- 
tate to  say  that  god-slaying  ceremonies,  more  or  less  at- 
tenuated, have  lingered  on  everywhere  in  obscure  forms 
among  the  folk-rites  and  folk-customs  of  the  most  civilised 
peoples. 

Without  doing  more  than  briefly  indicate  this  possibility, 
how^  /er,  I  pass  on  to  say  that  if  ever  there  was  really  a 
personal  Christ,  and  if  his  followers  began  by  vaguely  be- 
lieving In  his  resurrection,  the  legend,  as  we  get  it,  is  ob- 
viously made  up  of  collected  fragments  from  all  the  god- 
slaying  customs  and  beliefs  we  have  been  considering  in 
detail  through  the  last  six  or  seven  chapters.  In  the  Gos- 
pel of  his  later  believers,  after  the  sect  had  spread  widely 
among  the  Gentiles  of  the  towns,  Jesus  is  conceived  of  as 
a  corn  and  wine  god,  a  temporary  king,  slain  on  a  cross 
as  a  piacular  atonement,  and  raised  again  from  the  dead 


;  'i 

-II 

11 


,■'  il 


I  it 


!     I 

i       i 


i. 

i|i. 

I  ! 

■; 

1  ■  ■■  i    i   ■ 

1       1 
i 

i 

1 

'■  '  I 

t    ■ 

i'F 

• .    .i 

V  ■ 

ii    , 

i 
1'      ■ 

'■  :!    i;   ' 

hiLlu. 

380 


7//£  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


after  three  days,  in  the  manner  common  to  all  corn  and 
wine  gods.  It  is  possible,  of  course,  that  the  first  believers 
may  have  fastened  all  these  ideas  on  to  an  accidental  con- 
demnation and  execution,  so  to  speak;  but  it  is  possible 
too  that  the  Christ  may  actually  have  been  put  to  death 
at  the  great  spring  feast  of  the  Passover,  in  accordance 
with  some  obscure  and  unrecognised  folk-rite  of  the  rab- 
ble of  Jerusalem.  I  do  not  even  pretend  to  have  an 
opinion  on  this  subject;  I  do  not  assert  or  deny  any  his- 
torical nucleus  of  fact:  I  am  satisfied  with  saying  that  the 
story  on  the  whole  exhibits  the  Christ  to  us  entirely  in  the 
character  of  a  temporary  king,  slain  with  piacular  rites  as 
a  corn  and  wine  god.  In  this  case  at  least,  I  am  no  dog- 
matic Euhemerist. 

I  think  it  was  Professor  Freeman  who  once  quaintly 
described  Buddhism  as  "  a  blasphemous  anticipatory  pa- 
rody of  Christianity."  The  learned  historian's  idea  ap- 
parently was  that  the  author  of  all  evil,  being  aware 
beforehand  of  the  divine  intentions,  had  invented  Bud- 
dhism before  the  advent  of  Christ,  so  as  to  discount  the 
Christian  Plan  of  Salvation  by  anticipation.  If  so,  we 
must  regard  all  other  religions  as  similar  blasphemous  at- 
tempts at  forestalling  God:  for  we  shall  see  as  we  proceed 
that  every  one  of  them  contains  innumerable  anticipations 
of  Christianity — or,  to  put  it  conversely,  that  Christianity 
subsumes  them  all  into  itself,  in  a  highly  concentrated  and 
etherealised  solution. 

In  the  earliest  Christian  documents,  the  Pauline  and 
other  Apostolic  Epistles,  we  get  little  information  about 
the  history  of  the  real  or  mythical  Christ.  Shadowy  allu- 
sions alone  to  the  crucifixion  and  the  resurrection  repay 
our  scrutiny.  But  through  the  mist  of  words  we  see  two 
or  three  things  clearly.  The  Christ  is  described  as  the  son 
of  God — that  is  to  say  of  the  Jewish  deity ;  and  he  is  spoken 
of  continually  as  slain  on  a  post  or  tree,  the  sacred  symbol 
of  so  many  old  religions.  He  dies  to  save  mankind;  and 
salvation  is  offered  in  his  name  to  all  men.      A  careful 


THE  CHRIST  A  CORN-GOD.  381 

reading  of  the  epistles  from  this  point  of  view  will  give  in 
brief  an  epitome  of  the  earliest  and  least  dogmatic  yet  very 
doctrinal  Christian  theology.  Its  cardinal  points  are  four 
— incarnation,  death,  resurrection,  atonement. 

The  later  accounts  which  we  get  in  the  Gospels  are  far 
more  explicit.  The  legend  by  that  time  had  taken  form: 
it  had  grown  clear  and  consistent.  All  the  elements  of  the 
slain  and  risen  corn  and  wine  god  are  there  in  perfection. 
For  brevity's  sake,  I  will  run  all  these  accounts  together, 
adding  to  them  certain  traits  of  still  later  origin. 

The  aspect  of  Christ  as  a  survival  of  the  corn-god  is  al- 
ready clear  in  Paul's  argument  in  First  Corinthians  on  the 
resurrection  of  the  body.  This  argument  would  strike 
home  at  once  to  every  Greek  and  every  Asiatic.  "  That 
which  you  sow  is  not  quickened  unless  it  die.  And  when 
you  sow,  you  sow  not  the  body  that  is  to  be,  but  bare 
grain;  it  may  be  wheat  or  any  other  grain.  But  God  gives 
:t  a  shape  as  p.eases  him;  to  every  seed  its  own  body." 
The  whole  of  this  fifteenth  chapter,  the  earliest  statement 
of  the  Christian  belief,  should  be  read  through  in  this  con- 
nexion by  any  one  who  wishes  to  understand  the  close  re- 
lation of  the  idea  of  sowing  to  the  resurrection.  It  might 
have  been  written  by  any  worshipper  of  Adonis  or  Osiris 
who  wished  to  recommend  his  special  doctrine  of  a  bodily 
resurrection  to  a  doubtful  cremationist,  familiar  with  the 
cult  of  Dionysus  and  of  Attis. 

The  earliest  known  rite  of  the  Christian  church  was  the 
sacramental  eating  and  drinking  of  bread  and  wine  to- 
gether; which  rite  was  said  to  commemorate  the  death  of 
the  Lord,  and  his  last  supper,  when  he  eat  and  drank  bread 
and  wine  with  his  disciples.  Ihe  language  put  into  his 
mouth  on  this  occasion  in  the  Gospels,  especially  the 
Fourth,  is  distinctly  that  of  the  corn  and  wine  god.  "  I 
am  the  true  vine;  ye  are  the  branches."  "  I  am  the  bread 
of  life."  "Take,  eat,  this  is  my  body."  "This  is  my 
blood  of  the  new  testament."  Numberless  other  touches 
of  like  kind  are  scattered  through  the  speeches.     In  the 


11: 


1  i. 


<»«l 


I 


r 

i  I 


d'  • 


1      11 


r  J 


r  !; 


382 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


parable  of  the  vineyard,  God  the  Father  is  described  as  the 
owner  of  a  vineyard,  who  sends  his  only  begotten  son  to 
receive  the  fruit  of  it:  and  the  workers  slay  him.  The  first 
miracle  at  Cana  of  Galilee  is  one  where  water  is  turned 
into  wine  by  the  hand  of  Jesus:  and  so  on  through  a  long 
series  of  curious  instances,  which  readers  can  discover  for 
themselves  by  inspection. 

In  early  Christian  art,  as  exhibited  in  the  catacombs  at 
Rome,  the  true  vine  is  most  frequently  figured;  as  are  also 
baskets  of  loaves,  with  the  corresponding  miracle  of  the 
loaves  and  fishes.  Multiplication  of  bread  and  wine  are 
the  natural  credentials  of  the  corn  and  wine  god.  The 
earliest  description  we  possess  of  Christ,  that  of  John  of 
Damascus,  states  that  his  complexion  was  "  of  the  colour 
of  wheat  ";  while  in  the  apocryphal  letter  of  Lentulus  to 
the  Roman  Senate  we  read  in  the  same  spirit  that  his  hair 
was  "  wine-coloured."  The  Greek  description  by  Epi- 
phanius  Monachus  says  that  Christ  was  six  feet  high;  his 
hair  long  and  golden-coloured ;  and  in  countenance  he  was 
luddy  like  his  father  David.  All  these  descriptions  are  ob- 
viously influenced  by  the  identification  of  the  bread  and 
wine  of  the  eucharist  with  the  personal  Jesus. 

In  the  usage  of  the  church  from  very  early  days,  it  has 
been  customary  to  eat  the  body  of  Christ  in  the  form  of 
bread,  and  to  drink  his  blood  as  wine  in  the  sacrament. 
In  the  Catholic  church,  this  continuous  ceremony  takes 
place  at  an  altar,  containing  sacred  bones,  and  is  repre- 
sented as  being  the  offering  of  God,  himself  to  himself,  in 
the  form  of  a  mystic  and  piacular  sacrifice.  The  priest 
drinks  the  wine  or  blood  ;  the  laity  eat  only  the  bread  or 
body, 

A  curious  custom  which  occurs  in  many  churches  of 
Sicily  at  Easter  still  further  enforces  this  unity  of  Christ 
with  the  cult  of  earlier  corn  and  wine  gods,  like  Adonis  and 
Osiris.  The  women  sow  wheat,  lentils,  and  canary-seed 
in  plates,  which  are  kept  in  the  dark  and  watered  every 
second  day.     The  plants  soon  shoot  up;  they  are  then  tied 


THE  CHRIST  A  KING'S  SON. 


383 


ire 


his 


together  with  red  ribbons,  and  the  plates  containing  them 
are  placed  on  the  sepulchres  which,  with  effigies  of  the  dead 
Christ,  are  made  up  in  Roman  Catholic  and  Greek 
churches  on  Good  Friday,  "  just  as  the  gardens  of  Adonis," 
says  Mr.  Frazer,  "  were  placed  on  the  grave  of  the  dead 
Adonis."  In  this  curious  ceremony  we  get  a  survival  from 
the  very  lowest  stratum  of  corn-god  worship;  the  stratum 
where  an  actual  human  victim  is  killed,  and  corn  and  other 
crops  are  sown  above  his  body.  Even  where  the  sowing 
itself  no  longer  survives,  the  sepulchre  remains  as  a  relic 
of  the  same  antique  ritual.  Such  sepulchres  are  every- 
where common  at  Easter,  as  are  the  cradles  of  the  child- 
god  at  the  feast  of  the  winter  solstice.  The  Pieta  is  the 
final  form  of  this  mourning  of  the  corn-god  by  the  holy 
women. 

Passing  on  to  the  other  aspects  of  Christ  as  corn-god 
and  divine-human  victim,  we  see  that  he  is  doubly  recog- 
nised as  god  and  man,  like  all  the  similar  gods  of  early 
races.  In  the  speeches  put  into  his  mouth  by  his  bio- 
graphers, he  constantly  claims  the  Jewish  god  as  his 
father.  Moreover,  he  is  a  king;  and  his  kJngly  descent 
from  his  ancestor  David  is  insisted  upon  in  the  genealogies 
with  some  little  persistence.  He  is  God  incarnate;  but  also 
he  is  the  King  of  the  Jews,  and  the  King  of  Glory.  Wise 
men  come  from  the  east  to  worship  him,  and  bring  gifts  of 
gold  and  myrrh  and  frankincense  to  the  infant  God  in  his 
manger  cradle.  But  he  is  further  the  Christ,  the  anointed 
of  God;  and,  as  we  saw,  anointment  is  a  common  element 
with  numerous  other  divine-human  victims. 

Once  more,  he  is  the  King's  son;  and  he  is  the  only  be- 
gotten son,  the  dearly  beloved  son,  who  is  slain  as  an  ex- 
piation for  the  sins  of  the  people.  The  heavens  open,  and 
a  voice  from  them  declares,  "  This  is  my  beloved  son  in 
whom  I  am  well  pleased."  He  is  affiliated,  like  all  other 
such  victims,  on  the  older  and  earlier  ethnical  god.  Jah- 
weh;  and  though  he  is  himself  God,  and  one  with  the 
Father,  he  is  offered  up,  himself  to  himself,  in  expiation 


Hi 


•  1 


«•> 


i( 


I 


I- 


li 


l\ 


4l 


h 


m 


I  '  i'.t 


1:  ii 


i 


f'. 


'I 


''■:!  i  i 


\   I  r 


Hi 


384 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


of  the  sin  committed  by  men  against  divine  justice.  AH 
this  would  be  familiar  theology  indeed  to  the  worshipper 
of  Osiris,  Adonis,  and  Attis. 

The  common  Hebrew  offering  was  the  paschal  lamb; 
therefore  Christ  is  envisaged  as  the  Lamb  of  God,  that 
taiceth  away  the  sins  of  the  world.  In  the  paintings  of  the 
catacombs,  it  is  as  a  lamb  that  the  Saviour  of  the  world  is 
oftenest  represented.  As  a  lamb  he  raises  another  lamb, 
Lazarus;  as  a  lamb  he  turns  the  water  into  wine;  as  a 
lamb  he  strikes  the  living  springs  from  the  rock  on  the 
spandrils  of  the  sarcophagus  of  Junius  Bassus.  But  his 
birth  in  a  manger  is  also  significant:  and  his  vine  and  his 
dove  are  almost  as  frequent  as  his  lamb  in  the  catacombs. 

The  Gospel  history  represents  the  passion  o^  Christ  es- 
sentially as  the  sacrifice  of  a  temporary  king,  invested  with 
all  the  familiar  elements  of  that  early  ritual.  Christ  en- 
ters Jerusalem  in  royal  state,  among  popular  plaudits,  like 
those  which  always  accompany  the  temporary  king,  and 
the  Attis  or  Adonis.  He  is  mounted  on  an  ass,  the  royal 
beast  of  the  Semites.  The  people  fling  down  branches  of 
trees  in  his  path,  as  they  always  fling  down  parts  of  g^een 
trees  before  the  gods  of  vegetation.  On  Palm  Sunday 
his  churches  are  still  decked  with  palm-branches  or  with 
sprays  of  willow-catkin.  Such  rites  with  green  things  form 
an  integral  part  of  all  the  old  rituals  of  the  tree-god  or  the 
corn-god,  and  of  all  the  modem  European  survivals  in 
folk-lore — they  are  equally  found  in  the  Dionysiac  festi- 
val, and  in  the  Jack-in-the-Green  revels  on  English  fair- 
days.  The  connexion  with  trees  is  also  well  marked 
throughout  the  Gospels;  and  the  miracle  of  the  barren  fig- 
tree  is  specially  mentioned  in  close  connexion  with  the 
entry  into  Jerusalem.  The  people  as  he  entered  cried 
"  Hosanna  to  the  son  of  David  " ;  and  the  prophetic  words 
were  supposed  to  be  fulfilled,  "  Behold,  thy  king  cometh 
unto  thee,  meek,  sitting  upon  an  ass,  and  a  colt,  the  foal  of 
an  ass." 

The  Christ  goes  as  a  willing  victim  to  the  cross;  he  does 


THE  KING  OF  THE  JEWS. 


385 


not  seriously  ask  thai  the  cup  should  pass  from  him.  He 
foretells  his  own  death,  and  voluntarily  submits  to  it  But 
he  is  also  bought  with  a  price — the  thirty  pieces  of  silver 
paid  to  Judas.  Of  all  this,  we  had  forecasts  in  the  Khond, 
the  Mexican,  and  various  other  rituals. 

Furthermore,  there  is  a  trial — a  double  trial,  before  the 
high  priest,  and  before  Pilate.  Such  trials,  we  have  seen, 
are  common  elements  of  the  mock-king's  degradation. 
Like  all  other  similar  victim?  the  Chrst,  after  being  treated 
like  a  monarch,  is  reviled  and  spat  upon,  buffeted  and  in- 
sulted. He  is  bound  with  cords,  and  carried  before  Pi- 
late. The  procurator  asks  him,  "Art  thou  the  King  of 
the  Jews  ?  "  and  the  Christ  by  implication  admits  the  jus- 
tice of  the  title.  All  the  subsequent  episodes  of  the  pain- 
ful drama  are  already  familiar  to  us.  The  sacred  victim  is 
cruelly  scourged  that  his  tears  may  flow.  As  in  other 
cases  he  is  crowned  with  flowers  or  with  bark,  in  order  to 
mark  his  position  as  kin^*  of  vegetation,  so  here  he  is 
crowned  with  a  chaplet  of  thorns  that  adds  to  his  ignominy. 
The  sacred  blood  must  flow  from  the  sacred  head.  But 
still,  he  is  clothed  with  purple  and  saluted  with  the  words, 
"  Hail,  King  of  the  Jews  !  "  in  solemn  irony.  He  is  struck 
on  the  head  with  a  reed  by  the  soldiers:  yet  even  as  they 
strike,  they  bow  their  knees  and  worship  him.  They  give 
him  to  drink  wine,  mingled  with  myrrh;  "  but  he  received 
it  not."  Then  he  is  crucified  at  Golgotha,  the  place  of  a 
skull,*  on  a  cross,  the  old  sacred  emblem  of  so  many  re- 
ligions ;  it  bears  the  inscription,  "  The  King  of  the  Jews," 
by  order  of  the  Procurator.  After  the  death  of  the  Christ 
he  is  mourned  over,  like  Adonis  and  Osiris,  by  the  holy 
women,  including  his  mother.  I  do  not  think  I  need  point 
out  in  detail  the  many  close  resemblances  which  exist  be- 
tween the  Mother  of  the  Gods  and  the  Mother  of  God — 
the  Theotokos. 


•■l. 


*  According  to  mediaeval  legend,  the  skull  was  Adam's,  and  the  sacred 
blood  which  fell  upon  it  revived  it.  In  crucifixions,  a  skull  is  generally 
represented  at  the  foot  of  the  cross. 


V 


1 

■' 

i 

^ 

1^ 

■  i 

,1 

■fl 

;l;, 

'!     'i 

l.  \ 

i  '■ 
1 

'«' 

: 

1 

'    :  ..' 


,'"■■■  1  >  '    ,   ! 


386 


THE  GROWTH  OP  CHRISTIANITY. 


The  thieves  crucified  with  the  Saviour  have  their  legs 
broken,  Hke  many  other  sacred  victims;  but  the  Christ 
himself  has  not  a  bone  broken,  like  the  paschal  lamb  which 
was  the  Jewish  substitute  for  the  primitive  human  victim. 
Thus  both  ideas  on  this  subject,  the  earlier  and  the  later, 
seem  to  find  an  appropriate  place  in  the  history.  Instead 
of  having  his  legs  btoken,  however,  the  Christ  has  his 
side  pierced;  and  from  it  flows  the  mystic  blood  of  the 
atonement,  in  which  all  Christians  are  theoretically 
washed;  this  baptism  of  blood  (a  literal  reality  in  older 
cults)  being  already  a  familiar  image  at  the  date  of  the 
Apocalypse,  where  the  robes  of  the  elect  are  washed  white 
in  the  blood  of  the  lamb  that  was  slain. 

After  the  crucifixion,  the  Christ  is  taken  down  and  bu- 
ried. But,  like  all  other  corn  and  wine  gods,  he  rises 
again  from  the  dead  on  the  third  day — this  very  period  of 
three  days  being  already  a  conventional  one  in  similar 
cases.  Every  one  of  the  surroundings  recalls  Osiris  and 
Attis.  It  is  the  women  once  more  who  see  him  first;  and 
afterwards  the  men.  Finally,  he  ascends  into  heaven,  to 
his  Father,  before  the  wondering  eyes  of  his  disciples  and 
his  mother.  In  each  item  of  this,  there  is  nothing  with 
which  we  are  not  already  familiar  elsewhere. 

I  will  not  pursue  the  analogy  further.  To  do  so  would 
be  endless.  Indeed,  I  do  not  think  there  is  an  element  in 
the  Gospel  story  which  does  not  bear  out  the  parallel  here 
suggested.  The  slight  incident  of  the  visit  to  Herod,  for 
example,  is  exactly  analogous  to  the  visit  of  the  false 
Osiris  in  modern  Egypt  to  the  governor's  house,  and  the 
visit  of  the  temporary  or  mock  king  in  so  many  other 
cases  to  the  real  king's  palace.  The  episode  where  Herod 
and  his  men  of  war  array  the  Christ  in  a  gorgeous  robe  is 
the  equivalent  of  the  episode  of  the  Mexican  king  arraying 
the  god-victim  in  royal  dress,  and  is  also  paralleled  in 
numerous  other  like  dramas  elsewhere.  The  women  who 
prepare  spices  and  ointments  for  the  body  recall  the  Adonis 
rites;  Pilate  washing  his  hands  of  the  guilt  of  condemna- 


GROWTH  OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  MYTH. 


387 


tion  recalls  the  frequent  episode  of  the  slaughterers  of  the 
god  laying  the  blame  upon  others,  or  casting  it  on  the 
knife,  or  crying  out,  "  We  bought  you  with  a  price;  we 
are  guiltless."  Whoever  will  read  carefully  through  the 
Gospel  accounts,  side  by  side  with  Mr.  Frazer's  well-chosen 
collection  of  mock-king  narratives,  will  see  for  himself  that 
endless  other  minor  traits  crop  up  in  the  story  which  may 
be  equated  with  numerous  similar  incidents  in  the  death 
and  resurrection  of  the  man-god  elsewhere. 

The  very  subjects  of  the  parables  are  in  themselves  sig- 
nificant: the  lord  of  the  vineyard  who  sends  his  son,  whom 
the  hirers  slay;  the  labourers  who  come  at  the  eleventh 
hour:  the  sower  and  the  good  and  bad  ground:  the  gr«in 
of  mustard-seed  :  the  leaven  of  the  Pharisees  :  the  seed 
growing  secretly:  the  sons  in  the  vineyard.  It  will  be 
found  that  almost  all  of  them  turn  on  the  key-note  subjects 
of  bread  and  wine,  or  at  least  of  seed-sowing. 

By  what  precise  stages  the  "tory  of  the  Galilaean  man- 
god  arose  and  fixed  itself  around  the  person  of  the  real 
or  mythical  Jesus  it  would  be  hard  to  say.  Already  in  the 
epistles  we  may  catch  stray  glimpses,  in  the  germ,  of  most 
of  it.  Already  we  notice  strange  hints  and  foreshadow- 
ings.  Probably  the  first  Jewish  disciples  had  arrived  at 
the  outline  of  the  existing  story  even  before  the  Gentiles 
began  to  add  their  quotum.  And  when  we  look  at  docu- 
ments so  overloaded  with  miracle  and  legend  as  the  Gos- 
pels and  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  we  find  it  hard  indeed 
to  separate  any  element  of  historical  truth  from  the  enor- 
mous accretion  of  myth  and  legend.  Still,  I  see  no  grave 
reason  to  doubt  the  general  truth  of  the  idea  that  the 
Christian  belief  and  practice  arose  first  among  Galilaean 
Jews,  and  that  from  them  it  spread  with  comparative  rapi- 
dity to  the  people  of  Syria  and  Asia  Minor.  It  even  seems 
probable  that  one  Saul  or  Paul  was  really  the  person  who 
first  conceived  the  idea  of  preaching  the  new  religion 
throughout  the  empire,  and  especially  in  the  great  cities,  as 
a  faith  which  might  be  embraced  by  both  Jew  and  Gentile^ 


1  [ 


388 


THE  GROWTH  OP  CHRISTIANITY. 


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* 

Certainly,  while  the  young  cult  contained  most  of  the  best 
features  of  Judaism,  viewed  as  a  possible  universal  religion, 
— its  monotheism,  its  purity,  its  comparative  freedom  from 
vile  and  absurd  legends  of  the  gods  and  their  amours — 
it  surpassed  the  elder  faith  in  acceptability  to  the  world  at 
large,  and  especially  to  the  people  of  Syria  and  western 
Asia.  Every  one  of  them  could  have  said  with  perfect 
truth,  "  Nothing  is  changed;  there  is  but  one  god  more 
to  worship." 

As  the  church  spread,  the  legend  grew  apace.  To  the 
early  account  of  the  death  and  resurrection  of  the  King  of 
the  Jews,  later  narrators  added  th  ^  story  of  his  miraculous 
birth  from  a  virgin  mother,  who  conceived  directly  from 
the  spirit  of  God  wafted  down  upon  her.  The  wide  ex- 
tent and  the  origin  of  this  belief  about  the  conception  of 
gods  and  heroes  has  been  fully  examined  by  Mr.  Sidney 
Hartland  in  his  admirable  study  of  the  Legend  of  Perseus. 
The  new  believers  further  provided  their  divine  leader  with 
a  royal  genealogy  from  David  downward,  and  made  him 
by  a  tolerably  circuitous  argument  be  born  at  Bethlehem, 
according  to  the  supposed  prophecy — though  if  there  ever 
was  really  a  Jesus  at  all,  it  would  seem  that  the  one  fact 
of  which  we  could  feel  tolerably  sure  about  him,  was  the 
fact  of  his  being  a  man  of  Nazareth.  Later  writers  put 
into  his  mouth  a  high  moral  teaching  for  its  time,  somewhat 
anticipated  by  Hillel  and  other  rabbis,  and  perhaps  in  part 
of  Buddhist  origin;  they  also  made  him  announce  for  him- 
self that  divine  role  of  mediator  and  atoner  which  they 
themselves  claimed  for  the  Saviour  of  Mankind.  He  calls 
himself  the  vine,  the  bread  of  life,  the  good  shepherd;  he 
is  called  "  the  lamb  of  God  that  taketh  away  the  sins  of  the 
world,"  by  John  the  Baptist,  an  enthusiast  whose  fame  has 
attracted  him  at  last  into  the  Christian  legend.  Very 
early,  the  old  rite  of  water-lustration  or  baptism,  adopted 
by  John,  was  employed  as  one  of  the  chief  Christian  cere- 
monies, the  ceremony  of  initiation,  which  replaced  with 
advantage  the  bloody  and  dangerous  Jewish  circumcision. 


WHY  CHRISTIANITY  TRIUMPHED. 


389 


This  allowed  for  far  freer  proselytism  than  Judaism  could 
ever  expect;  and  though  no  doubt  at  first  the  Christians 
regarded  themselves  as  a  sect  of  the  Jews,  and  though 
they  always  adopted  entire  the  Jewish  sacred  books  and 
the  Jewish  God,  with  all  the  Jewish  history,  cosmogony, 
and  mythology,  yet  the  new  religion  was  from  the  begin- 
ning a  cosmopolitan  one,  and  preached  the  word  unto  all 
nations.  Such  a  faith,  coming  at  such  a  moment,  and  tell- 
ing men  precisely  what  they  were  ready  to  believe,  was  cer- 
tain beforehand  of  pretty  general  acceptance.  When  Con- 
stantine  made  Christianity  the  official  creed  of  the  empire, 
it  is  clear  that  he  did  but  put  an  official  stamp  of  approval 
on  a  revolution  that  had  long  been  growing  more  and 
more  inevitable. 

In  one  word,  Christianity  triumphed,  because  it  united 
in  itself  all  the  most  vital  elements  of  all  the  religions  then 
current  in  the  world,  with  little  that  was  local,  national,  or 
distasteful;  and  it  added  to  them  all  a  high  ethical  note 
and  a  social  doctrine  of  human  brotherhood  especially 
suited  to  an  age  of  unification  and  systematic  government. 

Occasionally,  even  in  the  Gospels  themselves,  we  get 
strange  passing  echoes  of  a  mysterious  identification  of 
the  Christ  with  the  ancient  Hebrew  ethnical  god,  not  as 
the  Lord  of  the  Universe  alone,  but  vaguely  remembered 
as  the  sacred  stone  of  the  ark,  the  Rock  of  Israel.  "  The 
stone  which  the  builders  rejected,  that  one  has  become  the 
head  of  the  corner."  "  Whosoever  shall  fall  on  this  stone 
shall  be  broken;  but  on  whomsoever  it  shall  fall,  it  will 
grind  him  to  powder."  And  in  a  speech  put  into  the  mouth 
of  Christ,  he  says  to  Peter,  "  Rock  thou  art,  and  on  this 
Rock  will  I  build  my  assembly."  * 

Sometimes,  too,  in  the  epistles  the  two  ideas  of  the  corn- 
god  and  the  foundation  stone-god  are  worked  upon  alter- 

*  I  can  honestly  assure  the  polemical  Protestant  divine  that  I  am 
well  aware  of  the  difference  in  gender  in  this  passage — and  of  its  utter 
unimportance.  The  name  Peter  could  not  well  be  made  feminine  to 
suit  a  particular  play  upon  words  or  to  anticipate  the  objections  of  a 
particular  set  uf  trivial  word-twisters. 


ii 


mm 


390 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


nately.  "  I  have  planted;  Apollos  watered."  "  Ye  are 
God's  husbandry;  ye  are  God's  building."  "  I  have  laid 
the  foundation,  and  another  builds  thereon.  Let  every 
man  take  care  how  he  builds  upon  it.  For  other  founda- 
tion can  no  man  lay  than  that  which  is  laid,  which  is  the 
Christ,  Jesus."  Or  again,  "  You  are  built  upon  the  foun- 
dation of  the  apostles  and  prophets,  Jesus,  the  Christ, 
being  himself  the  chief  corner  stone."  Whoever  rereads 
the  epistles  by  the  light  of  the  analogies  suggested  in  this 
book  will  find  that  they  positively  teem  with  similar  re- 
ferences to  the  familiar  theology  of  the  various  slain  man- 
gods,  which  must  have  been  known  to  every  one  along  the 
shores  of  the  Mediterranean. 

The  church  which  was  built  upon  this  rock — and  that 
Rock  was  Christ — has  shown  its  continuity  with  earlier 
religions  in  a  thousand  ways  and  by  a  thousand  analogies. 
Solar  and  astrological  elements  have  been  freely  admitted, 
side  by  side  with  those  which  recall  the  corn  and  wine 
gods.  The  chief  festivals  still  cling  to  the  solar  feasts  of 
the  equinoxes  and  the  solstices.  Thus  every  year  the 
church  celebrates  in  mimicry  the  death  and  resurrection  of 
the  Christ,  as  the  Mediterranean  peoples  celebrated  the 
death  and  resurrection  of  the  Attis,  the  Adonis,  the  Diony- 
sus, the  Osiris.  It  celebrates  the  feast  at  the  usual  time  for 
most  such  festivals,  the  spring  equinox.  More  than  that, 
it  chooses  for  the  actual  day  of  the  resurrection,  commonly 
called  in  English  Easter,  and  in  the  Latin  dialects  the  Pas- 
chal feast  (or  Paques),  a  trebly  astrological  date.  The  fes- 
tival must  be  as  near  as  possible  to  the  spring  equinox;  but 
it  must  be  after  a  full  moon,  and  it  must  be  on  the  day 
sacred  to  the  sun.  Before  the  feast,  a  long  fast  takes 
place,  at  the  close  of  which  the  Christ  is  slain  in  effigy,  and 
solemnly  laid  in  a  mimic  sepulchre.  Good  Friday  is  the 
anniversary  of  his  piacular  death,  and  the  special  day  of 
the  annual  mourning,  as  for  Adonis  and  Attis.  On  Easter 
Sunday,  he  rises  again  from  the  dead,  and  every  good 
Catholic  is  bound  to  communicate — to  eat  the  body  of  his 


! 


lil 


i  , 


wm 


mm 


INTRUSIVE  SOLAR  ELEMENT. 


391 


slaughtered  god  on  the  annual  spring  festival  of  reviving 
vegetation.  Comparison  of  the  Holy  Week  ceremonies 
at  Rome  with  the  other  annual  festivals,  from  the  Mexican 
corn-feast  and  the  Potraj  rite  of  India  to  Attis  and  Adonis, 
will  be  found  extremely  enlightening — I  mean,  of  course, 
the  ceremonies  as  they  were  when  the  Pope,  the  Priest- 
King,  the  representative  of  the  annual  Attis  at  Pessinus, 
officiated  publicly  in  the  Sistine  Chapel,  with  paschal 
music  known  as  Lamentations,  and  elevation  of  the  Host 
amid  the  blare  of  trumpets.  On  this  subject,  I  limit  my- 
self to  the  barest  hint.  Whoever  chooses  to  follow  out  so 
pregnant  a  clue  will  find  it  lead  him  into  curic)us  analogies 
and  almost  incredible  survivals. 

Similarly,  the  birth  of  Christ  is  celebrated  at  the  winter 
solstice,  the  well-known  date  for  so  many  earlier  cere- 
monies of  the  gods  of  vegetation.  Then  the  infant  god 
lies  unconscious  in  his  cradle.  Whoever  has  read  Mr. 
Frazer's  great  work  will  understand  the  connexion  of  the 
holly  and  the  mistletoe,  and  the  Christmas  tree,  with  this 
second  great  festival  of  Christendom,  very  important  in 
the  Teutonic  north,  though  far  inferior  in  the  south  to  the 
spring-tide  feast,  when  the  god  is  slain  and  eaten  of  neces- 
sity. I  limit  myself  to  saying  that  the  Christmas  rites  are 
all  of  them  rites  of  the  birth  of  the  corn-god. 

Even  the  Christian  cross,  it  is  now  known,  was  not  em- 
ployed as  a  symbol  of  the  faith  before  the  days  of  Con- 
stantine,  and  was  borrowed  from  the  solar  wheel  of  the 
Gaulish  sun-god-worshippers  who  formed  the  mass  of  the 
successful  emperor's  legionaries. 

We  are  now,  therefore,  in  a  very  diflferent  position  for 
understanding  the  causes  which  led  to  the  rise  and  de- 
velopment of  the  Christian  religion  from  that  which  we 
occupied  at  the  outset  of  our  enquiry.  We  had  then  to 
accept  crudely  the  bare  fact  that  about  the  first  century 
of  our  era  a  certain  cult  of  a  Divine  Man,  Jesus,  arose 
among  a  fraction  of  the  maritime  people  of  Lower  Syria. 
That  fact  as  we  at  first  received  it  stood  isolated  and  un- 


M 


:i       ^1 


I,    ;■!' 


I      l! 


i:  r 


•!!      il: 


5    ii    ■■■■    I 


392 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


related  in  its  naked  singularity.  We  can  now  see  that  it 
was  but  one  more  example  of  a  universal  god-making 
tendency  in  human  nature,  high  or  low;  and  in  our  last 
chapter  we  shall  find  that  this  universal  tendency  to  wor- 
ship the  dead  has  ever  since  persisted  as  fully  as  ever,  and 
is  in  fact  the  central  element  in  the  entire  religious  instinct 
of  hun^anity. 

The  main  emotional  chord  upon  which  Christianity 
played  in  its  early  days — and  indeed  the  main  chord  upon 
which  it  still  plays — is  just,  I  believe,  the  universal  feeling 
in  favour  of  the  deification  or  beatification  of  the  dead, 
with  the  desire  for  immortality  on  the  part  of  the  indi- 
vidual believer  himself  in  person.  Like  all  other  religions, 
but  even  more  than  any  other  religion  at  that  time  in 
vogue,  Christianity  appealed  to  these  two  allied  and  deep- 
seated  longings  of  human  nature.  It  appealed  on  the  one 
hand  to  the  unselfish  emotions  and  afifections  of  mankind 
by  promising  a  close,  bodily,  personal,  and  speedy  re- 
association  of  the  living  believer  with  his  dead  relatives 
and  friends.  It  appealed  on  the  other  hand  to  the  selfish 
wishes  and  desires  of  each,  by  holding  forth  to  every  man 
the  sure  and  certain  hope  of  a  glorious  resurrection.  Like 
all  other  creeds,  but  beyond  all  other  creeds,  it  was  the 
religion  of  immortality,  of  the  dead  revived,  of  the  new 
world  :  in  an  age  of  doubt,  of  scepticism,  of  the  decay 
of  faith,  it  gave  fresh  life  and  a  totally  new  basis  to  the 
old  beliefs — perhaps  the  old  delusions — of  the  religious 
nature. 

A  necessary  consequence  of  the  universal  ferment  and 
intermixture  of  pantheons  everywhere  during  the  early 
days  of  the  Roman  empire  was  a  certain  amount  of  floating 
scepticism  about  the  gods  as  a  whole,  which  reaches  its  high- 
est point  in  the  mocking  humour  of  Lucian,  or  still  earlier 
in  the  Epicurean  atheism  of  Lucretius  and  of  Roman  phi- 
losophy in  general.  But  while  this  nascent  scepticism  was 
very  real  and  very  widespread,  it  affected  rather  current 
beliefs  as  to  the  personality  and  history  of  the  various  gods 


RELIGIOUS  UNREST  OF  THE  EMPIRE. 


393 


than  the  underlying  conception  of  godhead  in  the  abstract. 
Even  those  who  laughed  and  those  who  disbelieved,  re- 
tained at  bottom  many  superstitions  and  supernatural 
ideas.  Their  scepticism  was  due,  not  like  that  of  our  own 
time  to  fundamental  criticism  of  the  very  notion  of  the 
supernatural,  but  to  the  obvious  inadequacy  of  existing 
gods  to  satisfy  the  requirements  of  educated  cosmo- 
politans. The  deities  of  the  time  were  too  coarse,  too 
childish,  too  gross  for  their  worshippers.  The  common 
philosophic  attitude  of  cultivated  Rome  and  cultivated 
Alexandria  might  be  compared  to  some  extent  to  that  of 
our  own  Unitarians,  who  are  not  indeed  hostile  to  the  con- 
ception of  theology  in  its  own  nature,  but  who  demur  to 
the  most  miraculous  and  supernatural  part  of  the  popular 
doctrine. 

With  the  mass,  however,  the  religious  unrest  showed 
itself  mainly,  as  it  always  shows  itself  at  such  critical 
moments,  in  a  general  habit  of  running  after  new  and 
strange  religions,  from  some  one  or  other  of  which  the 
anxious  enquirer  hopes  to  obtain  some  divine  answer  to 
his  doubts  and  difficulties.  When  old  faiths  decay,  there 
is  room  for  new  ones.  As  might  have  been  expected,  this 
tendency  was  most  clearly  shown  in  the  great  cosmopoli- 
tan trading  towns,  where  men  of  many  nations  rubbed 
shoulders  together,  and  where  outlandish  cults  of  various 
sorts  had  their  temples  and  their  adherents.  Especially 
was  this  the  case  at  Rome,  Alexandria,  and  Antioch,  the 
capitals  respectively  of  the  Roman,  the  Hellenic,  and  the 
Semitic  worlds.  In  the  Grseco-Egyptian  metropolis,  the 
worship  of  Serapis,  a  composite  deity  of  hybrid  origin, 
grew  gradually  into  the  principal  cult  of  the  teeming  city. 
At  Antioch,  Hellenic  deities  were  ousting  the  Baalim. 
At  Rome,  the  worship  of  Isis,  of  Jahweh,  of  Syrian  and 
other  remoter  Eastern  gods  was  carried  on  by  an  ever- 
increasing  body  of  the  foreign,  native,  and  servile  popula- 
tion. These  were  the  places  where  Christianity  spread. 
The  men  of  the  villages  were  long,  as  the  world  still 
quaintly  phrases  it,  "  pagans." 


T 
i 


■  ' i  /'^^^^r 


394 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


Wi 


sS:;  «,! 


.at 


::':.«! 


The  strange  cults  which  united  in  thus  gradually  crush- 
ing out  the  old  local  and  national  pantheons  throughout 
the  Roman  world,  had  for  the  most  part  two  marked  attri- 
butes in  common:  they  were  more  or  less  mystical:  and 
they  tended  more  or  less  in  the  direction  of  monotheism. 
Solar  myth,  syncretism,  the  esoteric  priestly  interpreta- 
tions, and  the  general  diffusion  of  Greek  philosophic 
notions,  mixed  with  subtler  oriental  and  Zoroastrian 
ideas,  had  all  promoted  the  rise  and  growth  of  the  mystic 
element:  while  a  vague  monotheistic  movement  had  long 
been  apparent  in  the  higher  thought  of  Egypt,  Greece, 
Italy,  and  the  East.  In  the  resulting  conflict  and  inter- 
mixture of  ideas,  Judaism,  as  one  of  the  most  mystical  and 
monotheistic  of  religions,  would  have  stood  a  good 
chance  of  becoming  the  faith  of  the  world,  had  it  not  been 
for  the  fatal  weight  of  its  strict  and  obstinate  national 
character.  Even  as  it  was,  Jewish  communities  were 
scattered  through  all  the  commercial  towns  of  the  Grjeco- 
Roman  world;  a  Jewish  colony  strongly  influenced  Alex- 
andria; and  Jewish  teachers  made  proselytes  in  Rome  in 
the  very  bosom  of  the  imperial  household. 

The  ferment  which  thus  existed  by  the  Orontes,  the 
Nile,  and  the  Tiber  must  also  have  extended  m  a  some- 
what less  degree  to  all  the  cosmopolitan  seaports  and 
trading  towns  of  the  great  and  heterogeneous  military 
empire.  What  was  true  of  Rome,  Alexandria,  and 
Antioch,  was  true  in  part,  we  have  every  reason  to  believe, 
of  Damascus,  of  Byzantium,  of  Sinope,  of  Ephesus  :  of 
Rhodes,  of  Cyrene,  of  Athens,  of  Carthage;  perhaps  even 
of  Massilia,  of  Gades,  of  Burdigala,  of  Lugdunum.  All 
around  the  eastern  Mediterranean  at  least,  new  faiths  were 
seething,  new  ideas  were  brewing,  new  mysticisms  were 
being  evolved,  new  superstitions  were  arising,  Phoenix- 
like, out  of  the  dying  embers  of  decaying  creeds.  Setting 
aside  mere  exotic  or  hybrid  cults,  like  the  worship  of 
Serapis  at  Alexandria  and  of  Isis  at  Rome,  or  mere  abor- 
tive attempts  like  the  short-lived  worship  of  Antinous  in 


S, 


COMPE  TING  WORLD-RELIGIONS. 


395 


Egypt,  we  may  say  that  three  of  these  new  rehgions  ap- 
pealed strongly  to  the  wants  and  desires  of  the  time:  and 
those  three  were  Mithraism,  Gnosticism,  and  Christianity. 

All  were  alike  somewhat  eclectic  in  character;  and  all 
could  lay  claim  to  a  certain  cosmopolitan  and  catholic 
spirit  unknown  to  the  cults  of  the  old  national  pantheons. 
All  came  to  the  Greek  and  Roman  world  from  the  mystic 
east,  the  land  of  the  rising  sun,  whose  magic  is  felt  even  at 
the  present  day  by  the  votaries  of  Theosophy  and  of 
Esoteric  Buddhism.  Which  of  the  three  was  to  conquer 
in  the  end  might  have  seemed  at  one  time  extremely 
doubtful  :  nor  indeed  do  I  believe  that  the  ultimate 
triumph  of  Christianity,  the  least  imposing  of  the  three, 
inevitable  as  it  at  last  became,  was  by  any  means  at  first 
a  foregone  conclusion.  The  religion  of  Jesus  probably 
owed  quite  as  much  to  what  we  call  chance — that  is  to  say, 
to  the  play  of  purely  personal  and  casual  circumstances — 
as  to  its  own  essential  internal  characteristics.  If  Con- 
stantine  or  any  other  shrewd  military  chief  had  happened 
to  adopt  the  syml:)ols  of  Mithra  or  Abraxas  instead  of  the 
name  of  Christ,  it  is  quite  conceivable  that  all  the  civilised 
world  might  now  be  adoring  the  mystic  divinity  of  the 
three  hundred  and  sixty-five  emanations,  as  sedulously  as 
it  actually  adores  the  final  theological  outcome  of  the  old 
Hebrew  Jahweh.  But'  there  were  certain  real  advantages 
as  well,  which  told,  I  believe,  in  the  very  nature  of  things, 
in  favour  of  the  Christ  as  against  the  coinage  of  Basilides 
or  the  far-eastern  sun-god.  Constantine,  in  other  words, 
chose  his  religion  wisely.  It  was  the  cult  exactly  adapted 
to  the  times:  above  all  others,  during  the  two  centuries  or 
so  that  had  passed  since  its  first  beginning  (for  we  must 
place  the  real  evolution  of  the  Christian  system  consider- 
ably later  than  the  life  or  death  of  Jesus  himself)  it  had 
shown  itself  capable  of  thoroughly  engaging  on  its  own 
side  the  profoundest  interests  and  emotions  of  the  re- 
ligious nature. 

We  must  remember,  too,  that  in  all  religious  crises. 


i  .1- 


i  '1 


i  ; 


E   ! 


*  1 


i 

1  i       U  1  ■    ■  1 

■!i  \ : 

1 

i 

1 

; 

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i 

1  ,    ' 
1 

11 

I'i  ralSi  i 


1    ■ 


1  i.!'-^''  r  \ 


396 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


while  faith  in  the  actual  gods  and  creeds  declines  rapidly, 
no  corresponding  weakening  occurs  in  the  underlying 
sentiments  on  which  all  religions  ultimately  base  them- 
selves. Hence  the  apparent  paradox  that  periods  of 
doubt  are  also  almost  always  periods  of  intense  credulity 
as  well.  The  human  mind,  cast  free  from  the  moorings 
which  have  long  sufficed  for  it,  drifts  about  restlessly  in 
search  of  some  new  haven  in  which  it  may  take  refuge 
from  the  terrors  of  uncertainty  and  infidelity.  And  its 
new  faith  is  always  but  a  fresh  form  of  the  old  one.  A  god 
or  gods,  prayer,  praise,  and  sacraments,  are  essential  ele- 
ments. More  especially  is  it  the  case  that  when  trust  in 
the  great  gods  begins  to  fail,  a  blind  groping  after  ne- 
cromancy, spiritualism,  and  ghost-lore  in  general  takes 
its  place  for  the  moment.  We  have  seen  this  tendency 
fully  exemplified  in  our  own  time  by  the  spiritualists  and 
others:  nor  was  it  less  marked  in  the  tempest  of  conflicting 
ideas  which  broke  over  the  Roman  world  from  the  age  of 
the  Antonines  to  the  fall  of  the  empire.  The  fact  is,  the 
average  man  cares  but  little,  after  all,  for  his  gods  and  his 
goddesses,  viewed  as  individuals.  They  are  but  an  outlet 
for  his  own  emotions.  He  appeals  to  them  for  help,  as 
long  as  he  continues  to  believe  in  their  effective  helpful- 
ness: he  is  ready  to  cajole  them  with  offerings  of  blood  or 
to  flatter  them  with  homage  of  praise  and  prayer,  as  long 
as  he  expects  to  gain  some  present  or  future  benefit, 
bodily  or  spiritual,  in  return  for  his  assiduous  adulation. 
But  as  soon  as  his  faith  in  their  existence  and  power  begins 
to  break  down,  he  puts  up  with  the  loss  of  their  godhead, 
so  far  as  they  themselves  are  concerned,  without  one 
qualm  of  disappointment  or  inconvenience.  It  is  some- 
thing far  other  than  that  that  touches  him  in  religion:  it 
is  his  hopes  for  his  own  eternal  welfare,  and  the  welfare 
after  death  of  those  that  love  him. 

Hence,  a  decline  of  faith  in  the  great  gods  is  immedi- 
ately followed  by  a  recrudescence  of  the  most  barbaric  and 
original  element  in  religion — the  cult  of  the  ghost  or 


,<- 


A 


^ 


IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  RESURRECTION. 


397 


spirit,  necromancy,  the  direct  worship  of  the  dead  or  inter- 
course with  the  dead:  a  habit  of  enquiry  into  the  positive 
chances  of  human  immortaHty.  This  necromantic  spirit 
is  well  marked  in  Gnostic  remains,  and  in  the  fragmentary 
magical  literature  of  the  decadent  Graeco-Roman  world. 
It  is  precisely  the  same  tendency  which  produces  spiritual- 
ism in  our  own  time:  and  it  is  due  to  the  desire  to  find 
some  new  and  experimental  basis  for  the  common  human 
belief  in  the  immortality  of  the  soul  or  the  resurrection  of 
the  body. 

And  here  we  get  the  clue  to  the  serious  change  which 
Christianity  wrought  in  the  religious  feeling  of  the  west- 
ern world:  a  change  whose  importance  and  whose  retro- 
grade nature  has  never  yet,  I  believe,  been  fully  recog- 
nised. For  Christianity,  while  from  one  point  of  view, 
as  a  monotheistic  or  quasi-monotheistic  religion,  an  im- 
mense advance  upon  the  aesthetic  paganism  of  Greece  and 
Italy,  was  from  another  point  of  view,  as  a  religion  of 
resurrection  rather  than  a  religion  of  immortality,  a  step 
backward  for  all  Western  Europe. 

Even  among  the  Jews  themselves,  however,  the  new 
cult  must  have  come  with  all  the  force  of  an  "  aid  to  faith  " 
in  a  sceptical  generation.  Abroad,  among  the  Jewish 
Hellenists,  Greek  philosophy  must  have  undermined  much 
of  the  fanatical  and  patriotic  enthusiasm  for  Jahweh  which 
had  grown  stronger  and  ever  stronger  in  Judaea  self 
through  the  days  of  the  Maccabees  and  the  Asmonaean 
princes.  Scraps  of  vague  Platonic  theorising  on  the  na- 
ture of  the  Divine  were  taking  among  these  exiles  the 
place  of  the  firm  old  dogmatic  belief  in  the  Rock  of  Israel. 
At  home,  the  Hellenising  tendencies  of  the  house  of 
Herod,  and  the  importance  in  Jerusalem  of  the  Sadducees 
**  who  say  there  is  no  resurrection,"  were  striking  at  the 
very  roots  of  the  hope  and  faith  that  pious  Jews  most 
tenderly  cherished.  Instead  of  Israel  converting  the 
world,  the  world  seemed  likely  to  convert  Israel. 
Swamped  in  the  great  absorbing  and  assimilating  empire. 


1 1  ii 
i  1 


\ 


Ul    Wi 


I 

1- 

h[ 

' 

i 

1 : 

> 

i 

398 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


Judah  might  follow  in  the  way  of  Ephraim.  And  Israel's 
work  in  the  world  might  thus  be  undone,  or  rather  stulti- 
fied for  ever. 

Just  at  this  very  moment,  when  all  faiths  were  tottering 
visibly  to  their  fall,  a  tiny  band  of  obscure  Galilaean  pea- 
sants, who  perhaps  had  followed  a  wild  local  enthusiast 
from  their  native  hills  up  to  turbulent  Jerusalem,  may  have 
been  seized  with  a  delusion  neither  unnatural  nor  unac- 
customed under  their  peculiar  circumstances;  but  which 
nevertheless  has  sufificed  to  turn  or  at  least  to  modify  pro- 
foundly the  entire  subsequent  course  of  the  world's  his- 
tory. Their  leader,  if  we  may  trust  the  universal  tradition 
of  the  sect,  as  laid  down  long  after  in  their  legendary 
Gospels,  was  crucified  at  Jerusalem  under  C.  Pontius 
Pilatus.  If  any  fact  upon  earth  about  Jesus  is  true,  besides 
the  fact  of  his  residence  at  Nazareth,  it  is  this  fact  of  the 
crucifixion,  which  derives  verisimilitude  from  being  always 
closely  connected  with  the  name  of  that  particular  Roman 
official.  But  three  days  after,  says  the  legend,  the  body 
of  Jesus  could  not  be  found  in  the  sepulchre  where  his 
friends  had  laid  him:  and  a  rumour  gradually  gained 
ground  that  he  had  risen  from  the  dead,  and  had  been  seen 
abroad  by  the  women  who  mourned  him  and  by  various  of 
his  disciples.  In  short,  what  was  universally  believed 
about  all  other  and  elder  human  gods,  was  specifically 
asserted  afresh  in  a  newer  case  about  the  man  Christ 
Jesus.  The  idea  fitted  in  with  the  needs  of  the  time,  and 
the  doctrine  of  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus  the  Christ  be- 
came the  corner-stone  of  the  new-born  Christian  religion. 

Nothing  can  be  clearer  than  the  fact  admitted  on  all 
hands,  that  this  event  formed  the  central  point  of  the 
Apostles'  preaching.  It  was  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus, 
regarded  as  an  earnest  of  general  resurrection  for  all  his 
followers,  that  they  most  insisted  upon  in  their  words  and 
writings.  It  was  the  resurrection  that  converted  the 
world  of  western  Europe.  "  Your  faith  is  flagging,"  said 
the  early  Christians  in  effect  to  their  pagan  fellows:  "  your 


THE  GOSPEL  SPREADS  IN   THE  EAST. 


399 


your 


gods  are  half-dead;  your  ideas  about  your  own  future,  and 
the  present  state  of  your  departed  friends,  are  most  vague 
and  shadowy.  In  opposition  to  all  this,  we  offer  you  a 
sure  and  certain  hope;  we  tell  you  a  tale  of  real  life,  and 
recent;  we  preach  a  god  of  the  familiar  pattern,  yet  very 
close  to  you;  \we  present  you  with  a  specimen  of  actual 
resurrection.  We  bring  you  good  tidings  of  Jesus  as  the 
Messiah,  and  him  crucified  :  to  the  Jews,  a  stumbling- 
block  ;  to  the  Greeks,  foolishness  ;  but  to  such  as  are 
saved,  a  plain  evidence  of  the  power  of  <^he  God  of  Israel. 
Accept  our  word:  let  your  dead  sleep  in  Christ  in  our 
catacombs,  as  once  they  slept  in  Osiris  at  Abydos,  or 
rested  upon  him  that  rests  at  Philse."  '*  If  Christ  be  not 
risen,"  says  one  of  the  earliest  Christian  writers  in  a  pas- 
sionate peroration,  "  then  is  our  preaching  vain,  and  your 
faith  is  vain  also:  but  as  it  is,  Christ  is  risen  from  the  dead, 
and  has  become  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept."  "  Else 
what  shall  they  do,"  he  goes  on,  touching  to  the  quick  that 
ingrained  human  desire  for  communion  with  the  departed, 
"  what  shall  they  do  which  are  baptised  for  the  dead,  if  the 
dead  rise  not  at  all  ?  Why  are  they  then  baptised  for  the 
dead  ?  "  These,  in  short,  apart  from  the  elements  com- 
mon to  all  creeds,  are  the  three  great  motors  of  primitive 
Christianity:  one  dogmatic,  the  resurrection  of  Jesus:  one 
selfish,  the  salvation  of  the  individual  soul:  one  altruistic, 
the  desire  for  reunion  with  the  dead  among  one's  be- 
loved. 

Syria  and  Egypt  could  easily  accept  the  new  doctrine. 
It  involved  for  them  no  serious  change  of  front,  no  wide 
departure  from  the  ideas  and  ceremonies  which  always 
formed  their  rounded  concept  of  human  existence.  There 
is  a  representation  of  the  resurrection  of  Osiris  in  the  little 
temple  on  the  roof  at  Denderah  which  might  almost  pass 
for  a  Christian  illustration  of  the  resurrection  of  Jesus. 
To  Syrian  and  Egyptian,  the  resurrection  indeed  was  but 
a  special  modern  instance  of  a  well-known  fact;  a  fresh 
basis  of  evidence  upon  which  to  plant  firmly  the  tottering 


I; 


. » 


i 


400 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


f  m 


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1 

1, 

.       1 

1  i 

■  '    f 
i 

\  i 

,    ' 

edifice  of  their  old  convictions.  In  its  beginnings,  in 
short,  Christianity  was  essentially  an  oriental  religion;  it 
spread  fastest  in  the  eastern  Mediterranean  basin,  where 
Judaism  was  already  well  established:  at  Rome,  it  seems 
to  have  attracted  chiefly  the  oriental  population.  And  it 
is  a  significant  fact  that  its  official  adoption  -as  the  public 
religion  of  the  Roman  state  was  the  act  of  the  same  prince 
who  deliberately  shifted  the  seat  of  his  government  from 
the  Tiber  to  the  Bosphorus,  and  largely  transformed  the 
character  of  the  empire  from  a  Latin  to  a  Graeco-Asiatic 
type.  All  the  new  religions  which  struggled  together  for 
the  mastery  of  the  world  were  oriental  in  origin  :  the 
triumph  of  Christianity  was  but  a  single  episode  in  the 
general  triumph  of  aggressive  orientalism  over  the  occi- 
dental element  in  the  Roman  system. 

Egypt  in  particular,  I  believe,  had  far  more  to  do  with 
the  dogmatic  shaping  of  early  Christianity,  and  the  settle- 
ment of  Christian  symbolism  and  Christian  mysticism, 
than  is  generally  admitted  by  the  ofificial  historians  of  the 
primitive  church.  There,  where  the  idea  of  resurrection 
was  already  so  universal,  and  where  every  man  desired  to 
be  "  justified  by  Osiris,"  Christianity  soon  made  an  easy 
conquest  of  a  people  on  whose  faith  it  exerted  so  little 
change.  And  Egypt  easily  made  its  influence  felt  on  the 
plastic  young  creed.  It  is  allowed  that  the  doctrine  of  the 
Trinity  took  shape  among  the  Triad-worshippers  on  the 
banks  of  the  Nile,  and  that  the  scarcely  less  important  doc- 
trine of  the  Logos  was  borrowed  from  the  philosophy  of 
Alexandrian  Jews.  Nobody  can  look  at  the  figures  of 
Isis  and  the  infant  Horus  in  any  Egyptian  museum  with- 
out being  at  once  struck  by  the  obvious  foreshadowing  of 
the  Coptic  and  Byzantine  Madonna  and  Child.  The  mys- 
tery that  sprang  up  about  the  new  doctrines;  the  strange 
syncretic  union  of  Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost  into  a 
single  Trinity;  the  miraculous  conception  by  the  Theo- 
tokos  or  mother  of  God — a  clear  variant  in  one  aspect  on 
the  older  idea  of  Hathor;  and  the  antenatal  existence  of 


.1 


EGYPTIAN  CHRISTIANITY. 


401 


Christ  in  heaven  before  his  incarnation ;  all  are  thoroughly 
Egyptian  in  character,  with  a  faint  superadded  dash  of 
Alexandrian  Jewish  Hellenism.  The  love  of  symbols 
which  the  young  church  so  early  exhibits  in  the  catacombs 
and  elsewhere  smacks  equally  of  Ptolemaic  reminiscences 
of  Thebes  and  Memphis.  The  mummy-form  of  Lazarus; 
the  fish  that  makes  such  a  clever  alphabetic  ideogram  for 
the  name  and  titles  of  Jesus;  the  dove  that  symbolises  the 
Holy  Ghost;  the  animal  types  of  the  four  evangelists — all 
these  are  in  large  part  Egyptian  echoes,  resonant  of  the 
same  spirit  which  produced  the  hieroglyphics  and  the 
symbolism  of  the  great  Nilotic  temples.  At  the  same 
time  it  must  be  remembered  that  sacred  fish  were  common 
in  Syria,  and  that  similar  identifications  of  gods  with  ani- 
mals have  met  us  at  every  turn,  in  our  earlier  investiga- 
tion. 

Nay,  more,  the  very  details  themselves  of  Christian 
symbolism  often  go  back  to  early  Egyptian  models. 
The  central  Christian  emblem  of  all,  the  cross,  is 
holy  all  the  world  over :  it  is  the  sacred  tree  :  and 
each  race  has  adapted  it  to  its  own  preconceived 
ideas  and  symbols.  But  in  Coptic  Christianity  it  has 
obvious  affinities  with  the  crux  ansata.  In  the  Coptic 
room  of  the  New  Museum  at  Ghizeh  is  an  early  Christian 
monument  with  a  Greek  uncial  inscription,  on  which  is 
represented  a  cross  of  four  equal  limbs  with  expanded 
flanges,  having  a  crux  ansata  inserted  in  all  its  four  in- 
terstices. At  the  Coptic  church  of  Abu  Sirgeh  at  Old 
Cairo  occurs  a  similar  cross,  also  with  suggestions  of  Tau- 
like  origin,  but  with  other  equal-limbed  crosses  substi- 
tuted for  the  cruces  ansata  in  the  corners.*  How  far  the 
Egyptian  Christians  thus  merely  transferred  their  old  ideas 
to  the  new  faith  may  be  gathered  from  a  single  curious 
example.     In  Mr.  Loftie's  collection  of  sacred  beetles  is  a 

♦  Count  Goblet  d'Alviella's  interesting  work  on  TAe  Migration  of 
Symbols  well  illustrates  this  connmon  syncretism  and  interchangeability 
of  symbolic  signs,  which  runs  parallel  with  the  syncretism  of  gods  and 
religions. 


I  i< 


I! 


I ') 


1 1 


!    \ 


402 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


\.     i 


scarahaeus  containing  a  representation  of  the  crucifixion, 
with  two  palm  branches:  and  other  scarabs  have  Christian 
crosses,  "some  of  them,"  says  Mr.  Loftie,  "very  unmistak- 
able." If  we  remember  how  extremely  sacred  the  scarab 
was  held  in  the  Egyptian  religion,  and  also  that  it  was  re- 
garded as  the  symbol  of  the  resurrection,  we  cannot  pos- 
sibly miss  the  importance  of  this  implication.  Indeed, 
the  Alexandrian  Father,  Epiphanius,  speaks  of  Christ  as 
"  the  scarabaeus  of  God,"  a  phrase  which  may  be  still 
better  understood  if  I  add  that  in  the  treatise  on  hiero- 
glyphs known  under  the  name  of  Horapollo  a  scarabaeus 
is  said  to  denote  "  an  only-begotten."  Thus  "  the  lamb 
of  God  "  in  the  tongue  of  Israel  becomes  "  the  scarabaeus 
of  God  "  in  the  mouth  of  an  Egyptian  speaker.  To  put  it 
shortly,  I  believe  we  may  say  with  truth,  in  a  sense  far 
other  than  that  intended  by  either  prophet  or  evangelist, 
"  Out  of  Egypt  have  I  called  my  son." 

In  the  west,  however,  the  results  of  the  spread  of  Chris- 
tianity were  far  more  revolutionary.  Indeed,  I  do  not 
think  the  cult  of  Jesus  could  ever  have  spread  at  all  in 
Rome  had  it  not  been  for  the  large  extent  to  which  the 
city  was  peopled  in  later  times  by  Syrians  and  Africans. 
And  if  Christianity  had  not  spread  in  Rome,  it  could  never 
have  gained  a  foothold  at  all  in  the  Aryan  world:  for  it  is 
not  at  bottom  an  Aryan  religion  in  tone  and  feeling:  it 
has  only  become  possible  among  Aryan  peoples  by  under- 
going  at  last  a  considerable  change  of  spirit,  though  not 
largely  of  form,  in  its  westward  progress.  This  change 
is  indicated  by  the  first  great  schism,  which  severed  the 
Latin  from  the  Greek  communion. 

Foremost  among  the  changes  which  Christianity  in- 
volved in  Italy  and  the  rest  of  western  Europe  was  the 
retrograde  change  from  the  belief  in  immortality  and  the 
immateriality  of  the  soul,  with  cremation  as  its  practical 
outcome,  to  the  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  the  body,  with 
a  return  to  the  disused  and  discredited  practice  of  burial 
as  its  normal  correlative.     The  catacombs  were  the  neces- 


THE  GOSPHL  SPREADS  IN  THE  WEST. 


4^3 


sary  result  of  this  backward  movement  ;  and  with  the 
ci  acombs  came  in  the  possibility  of  rehc-worship,  martyr- 
worship,  and  the  adoration  of  saints  and  their  corpsf  d.  I 
shall  trace  out  in  my  next  chapter  the  remoter  effects  of 
this  curious  revival  of  the  prime  element  in  religion — the 
cult  of  the  dead — in  greater  detail :  it  must  suffice  here  to 
point  out  briefly  that  it  resulted  as  a  logcal  effect  from 
the  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  Christ,  and  the  consequent 
restoration  of  the  practice  of  burial.  Moreover,  to  poly- 
theists,  this  habit  gave  a  practical  opening  for  the  cult  of 
many  deities  in  the  midst  of  nominal  monotheism,  which 
the  Italians  and  sundry  other  essentially  polytheistic 
peoples  were  not  slow  to  seize  upon.  Here  again  the  dif- 
ference between  the  more  monotheistic  and  syncretic  east„ 
which  puts  a  ban  upon  graven  images,  and  the  more  poly- 
theistic and  separating  west,  which  freely  admits  the  em- 
ployment of  sculpture,  is  not  a  little  significant.  It  is  true 
that  theoretically  the  adoration  paid  to  saints  and  martyrs 
is  never  regarded  as  real  worship:  but  I  need  hardly  say^ 
that  technical  distinctions  like  these  are  always  a  mere  part 
of  the  artificial  theology  of  scholastic  priesthoods,  and  may 
be  as  safely  disregarded  by  the  broad  anthropological 
enquirer  as  may  all  the  other  fanciful  lumber  of  metaphysi- 
cal Brahmans  and  theologians  everywhere.  The  genuine 
facts  of  religion  are  the  facts  and  rites  of  the  popular  cult, 
which  remain  in  each  race  for  long  periods  together 
essentially  uniform. 

Thus  we  early  get  two  main  forms  of  Christianity,  both 
official  and  popular:  one  eastern — Greek,  Coptic,  Syrian j 
more  mystical  in  type,  more  symbolic,  more  philosophic, 
more  monotheistic  :  the  other  western — Latin,  Celtic^ 
Spanish;  more  Aryan  in  type,  more  practical,  more  ma- 
terial, more  polytheistic.  And  these  at  a  later  time  are 
reinforced  by  a  third  or  northern  form, — the  Teutonic  and 
Protestant;  in  which  ethical  ideas  preponderate  over 
religious,  and  the  worship  of  the  Book  in  its  most  literal 
and  often  foolish  interpretation  supersedes  the  earlier  wor- 
ship of  Madonna,  siints,  pictures,  statues,  and  emblems. 


w 


404 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


H    i:M 


!■! 


I'     '  I  ■  ■    ?; 


i 


i.^^i 


At  the  period  when  Christianity  first  begins  to  emerge 
from  the  primitive  obscurity  of  its  formative  nisus,  how- 
ever, we  find  it  practically  compounded  of  the  following 
elements — which  represent  the  common  union  of  a 
younger  god  offered  up  to  an  older  one  with  whom  he  is 
identified. 

First  of  all,  as  the  implied  basis,  taken  for  granted  in 
all  the  early  Hebrew  scriptures,  there  is  current  Judaism, 
in  the  form  that  Judaism  had  gradually  assumed  in  the 
fourth,  third,  and  second  centuries  before,  the  Christian 
era.  This  includes  as  its  main  principle  the  cult  of  the 
one  god  Jahweh,  now  no  longer  largely  thought  of  under 
that  personal  name,  or  as  a  strictly  ethnic  deity,  but  rather 
envisaged  as  the  Lord  God  who  dwells  in  heaven,  very 
much  as  Christians  of  to-day  still  envisage  him.  It  in- 
cludes also  an  undercurrent  of  belief  in  a  heavenly  hier- 
archy of  angels  and  archangels,  the  court  of  the  Lord 
(modifications  of  an  earlier  astrological  conception,  the 
Host  of  Heaven),  and  in  a  principle  of  evil,  Satan  or  the 
devil,  dwelling  in  hell,  and  similarly  surrounded  by  a 
crowd  of  minor  or  assistant  demons.  Further,  it  accepts 
implicitly  from  earlier  Judaism  the  resurrection  of  the 
dead,  the  judgment  of  the  good  and  the  wicked,  the  doc- 
trine of  future  rewards  and  punishments  (perhaps  in  its 
fullest  shape  a  Hellenistic  importation  from  Egypt,  though 
also  commonly  found  in  most  spontaneous  religions),  and 
many  other  tenets  of  the  current  Jewish  belief.  In  short, 
the  very  earliest  Christians,  being  probably  for  the  most 
part  Jews,  Galilaeans,  and  proselytes,  or  else  Syrians  and 
Africans  of  Judaising  tendencies,  did  not  attempt  to  get 
rid  of  all  their  preconceived  religious  opinions  when  they 
became  Christians,  but  merely  superadded  to  these  as  a 
new  item  the  special  cult  of  the  deified  Jesus. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  the  Gospel  spread  to  the  Gentiles, 
it  was  not  thought  necessary  to  burden  the  fresh  converts 
with  the  whole  minute  ceremonial  of  Judaism,  and  espe- 
cially with  the  difficult  and  unpleasant  initiatory  rite  of 


JUDAIC  SURVIVALS. 


405 


circumcision.  A  mere  symbolical  lustration,  known  as 
baptism,  was  all  that  was  demanded  of  new  adherents  to 
the  faith,  with  abstinence  from  any  participation  in 
"  heathen  "  sacrifices  or  functions.  To  this  extent  the  old 
exclusiveness  of  Jahweh -worship,  the  cult  of  the  jealous 
God,  was  still  allowed  to  assert  itself.  And  the  general 
authority  of  the  Hebrew  scriptures,  especially  as  a  histori- 
cal account  of  the  development  of  Judaism,  from  which 
Christianity  sprang,  was  more  or  less  fully  admitted,  at 
first  by  implication  or  quotation  alone,  but  afterwards  by 
the  deliberate  and  avowed  voice  of  the  whole  Christian 
assembly.  The  translation  of  this  mixed  mass  of  histori- 
cal documents,  early  cosmogonies,  ill-reported  and  Jeho- 
vised  Jewish  traditions,  misinterpreted  poems,  and  con- 
scious forgeries,  in  the  Latin  version  known  as  the  Vul- 
gate, had  the  efifect  of  endowing  Europe  for  many 
centuries  with  a  false  body  of  ancient  history,  which 
must  have  largely  retarded  the  development  of  the  race 
up  to  our  own  time,  and  whose  evil  effects  have  hardly 
yet  passed  away  among  the  more  ignorant  and  conserva- 
tive Bibliolatrous  classes  of  modern  society. 

Superimposed  upon  this  substratum  of  current  Judaism 
with  its  worship  of  Jahweh  came  the  distinctive  Jesus-cult, 
the  worship  of  the  particular  dead  Galilaean  peasant.  This 
element  was  superadded  to  the  cult  of  the  Father,  the 
great  god  \/ho  had  slowly  and  imperceptibly  developed 
out  of  the  sacred  stone  that  the  sons  of  Israel  were  believed 
to  have  brought  up  with  them  from  the  land  of  Egypt. 
But  how,  in  a  religion  pretending  to  be  monotheistic,  were 
these  two  dist'nct  cults  of  two  such  diverse  gods  to  be 
reconciled  or  to  be  explained  away  ?  By  the  familiar 
doctrine  of  the  incarnation,  and  the  belief  in  the  human 
god  who  is  sacrificed,  himself  to  himself,  as  a  piacular 
offering.  Jewish  tradition  and  '  abtler  Egyptian  mysti- 
cism sufficed  to  smooth  over  the  apparent  anomaly.  The 
Jews  looked  forward  to  a  mysterious  deliverer,  a  new 
Moses,  the  Messiah,  who  was  to  fulfil  the  destiny  of 
Israel  by  uniting  all  nations  under  the  sceptre  of  David, 


(h: 


:S' 


1                                 ,: 

i 
■■    j 
'  .if,  -1:  ']:  ■ 

;     'i 

■■h 

'1 

- 

;■' ;-. 'M 

-'      r 

i 

'    1 

i    ''•^■i'     i 

1 

t 

1 

',-;  ■ 

■; 

I 

i 

i  *■ 

ll 
■( 


406 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


and  by  bringing  the  Gentiles  to  the  feet  of  the  God  of 
Israel.  Jesus,  said  the  Christians,  had  proclaimed  him- 
self that  very  Messiah,  the  Christ  of  God;  he  liad  often 
alluded  to  the  great  Hebrew  deity  as  his  father;  he  had 
laid  claim  to  the  worship  of  the  Lord  of  heaven.  Further 
than  this,  perhaps,  the  unaided  Jewish  intelligence  would 
hardly  have  gone:  it  would  have  been  satisfied  with 
assigning  to  the  slain  man-god  Jesus  a  secondary  place, 
as  the  only  begotten  Son  of  God,  who  gave  himself  up  as  a 
wilHng  victim — a  position  perhaps  scarcely  more  important 
than  that  which  Mohammad  holds  in  the  system  of  Islam. 
Such,  it  seems  to  me,  is  on  the  whole  the  conception  which 
permeates  the  synoptic  Gospels,  representing  the  ideas  of 
Syrian  Christendom.  But  here  the  acute  Grseco-Egyp- 
tian  mind  came  in  with  its  nice  distinctions  and  its  mystical 
identifications.  There  was  but  one  god,  indeed;  yet  that 
god  was  at  least  twofold  (to  go  no  further  for  the  present). 
He  had  two  persons,  the  Father  and  the  Son  :  and  the 
Second  Person,  identified  with  the  Alexandrian  concep- 
tion of  the  Logos,  though  inferior  to  the  Father  as  touch- 
ing his  manhood,  was  equal  to  the  Father  as  touching  his 
godhead — after  the  precise  fashion  we  saw  so  common  in 
describing  the  relations  of  Osiris  and  Horus,  and  the  iden- 
tification of  the  Attis  or  Adonis  victim  with  the  earlier 
and  older  god  he  represented.  "  I  and  my  Father  are 
one,"  says  the  Christ  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  the  embodi- 
ment and  incarnation  of  the  Alexandrian  Logos.  And  in 
the  very  forefront  of  that  manifesto  of  Neo-Platonic 
Christianity  comes  the  dogmatic  assertion,  "  In  the  be- 
ginning was  the  Logos:  and  the  Logos  dwelt  with  God: 
and  the  Logos  was  God." 

Even  so  the  basis  of  the  new  creed  is  still  incomplete. 
The  Father  and  Son  give  the  whole  of  the  compound 
deity  as  the  popular  mind,  everywhere  and  always,  has 
commonly  apprehended  it.  But  the  scholastic  and  theo- 
logical intelligence  needed  a  Third  Person  to  complete  the 
Trinity  which  to  all  mankind,  as  especially  to  orientals,  is 


EVOLUTION  OF  THE   TRINITY. 


407 


the  only  perfect  and  thoroughly  rounded  figure.     In  later 
days,  no  doubt,  the  Madonna  would  have  been  chosen 
to  fill  up  the  blank,  and,  on  the  analogy  of  Isis,  would 
have  filled  it  most  efficiently.     As  a  matter  of  fact,  in  the 
creed  of  Christendom  as  the  Catholic  people  know  it,  the 
Madonna  is  really  one  of  the  most  important  personages. 
But  in  those  early  formative  times,  the  cult  of  the  Theo- 
tokos  had  hardly  yet  assumed  its  full  importance:  perhaps, 
indeed,  the  Jewish  believers  would  have  been  shocked  at 
the  bare  notion  of  the  worship  of  a  woman,  the  readmis- 
sion  of  an  Astarte,  a  Queen  of  Heaven,  into  the  faith  of 
Israel.     Another  object  of  adoration  had  therefore  to  be 
found.     It   was   discovered   in   that   vague   essence,   the 
Holy  Ghost,  or  Divine  Wisdom,  whose  gradual  develop- 
ment and  dissociation  from  God  himself  is  on^  of  the  most 
curious  chapters  in  all  the  histor>  of  artificial  god-making. 
The  "  spirit  of  Jahweh  "  had  frequently  been  mentioned  in 
Hebrew  writings;  and  with  so  invisible  and  unapproach- 
able a  deity  as  the  Jewish  God,  was  often  made  to  do  duty 
as  a  messenger  or  intermediary  where  the  personal  pre- 
sence of  Jahweh  himself  would  have  been  felt  to  contravene 
the  first  necessities  of  incorporeal  divinity.      It  was  the 
*'  spirit  of  Jahweh  "  that  came  upon  the  prophets:  it  was 
the  "  wisdom  of  Jahweh  "  that  the  poets  described,  and 
that  grew  at  last  to  be  detached  from  the  personality  of 
God,  and  alluded  to  almost  as  a  living  individual.     In  the 
early  church,  this  "  spirit  of  God,"  this  "  holy  spirit,"  was 
supposed  to  be  poured  forth  upon  the  heads  of  believers: 
it  descended  upon  Jesus  himself  in  the  visible  form  of  a 
dove  from  heaven,  and  upon  the  disciples  at  Pentecost  as 
tongues  of  fire.     Gradually,  the  conception  of  a  personal 
Holy  Ghost  took  form  and  definiteness  :  an  Alexandrian 
monk  insisted  on  the  necessity  for  a  Triad  of  gods  who 
were  yet  one  God  :  and  by  the  time  the  first  creeds  of  the 
nascent  church  were  committed  to  writing,  the  Spirit 
had  come  to  rank  with  the  Father  and  the  Son  as  the 
Third  Person  in  the  ever-blessed  Trinity. 


' 


^M 


I  A'     ■■■ 


.|ii'  •, 


1 

'«i 

1    •■ 

i 

f 
1 

! 
1 

i    ^l 


li 


408 


THJE  GROWTH  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 


By  this  time,  too,  it  is  pretty  clear  that  the  original  man- 
hood of  Jesus  had  got  merged  in  the  idea  of  his  eternal 
godhead;  he  was  regarded  as  the  Logos,  come  down  from 
heaven,  where  he  had  existed  before  all  worlds,  and  in- 
carnate by  the  Holy  Ghost  in  the  Virgin  Mary.  The 
other  articles  of  the  Christian  faith  clustered  gradually 
round  these  prime  elements:  the  myth  gathered  force; 
the  mysticism  increased;  the  secondary  divine  beings  or 
saints  grew  vastly  in  numbers;  and  the  element  of  Juda- 
ism disappeared  piecemeal,  while  a  new  polytheism  and  a 
new  sacerdotalism  took  root  apace  in  the  Aryan  world.  I 
shall  strive  to  show,  however,  in  my  concluding  chapters, 
how  even  to  the  very  end  the  worship  of  the  dead  is  still 
the  central  force  in  modern  Christianity:  how  religion, 
whatever  its  form,  can  never  wander  far  from  that  funda- 
mental reality:  and  how,  whenever  by  force  of  circum- 
stances the  gods  become  too  remote  from  human  life,  so 
that  the  doctrine  of  resurrection  or  personal  immortality 
is  endangered  for  a  time,  and  reunion  with  relations  in  the 
other  world  becomes  doubtful  or  insecure,  a  reaction  is 
sure  to  set  in  v/hich  takes  things  back  once  more  to  these 
fundamental  concepts,  the  most  persistent  and  perpetually 
recurrent  element  in  all  religious  thinking. 


,;     ! 


i  |i  ;.i 


THE  GOD  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 


409 


CHAPTER   XIX. 

SURVIVALS    IN    CHRISTENDOM. 

We  have  now  travelled  far,  apparently,  from  that  primi- 
tive stage  of  god-making  where  the  only  known  gods  are 
the  corpses,  mummies,  skulls,  ghosts,  or  spirits  of  dead 
chieftains  or  dead  friends  and  relations.  The  God  of 
Christianity,  in  his  fully-evolved  form,  especially  as  known 
to  thinkers  and  theologians,  is  a  being  so  vast,  so  abstract, 
so  ubiquitous,  so  eternal,  that  he  seems  to  have  hardly 
any  points  of  contact  at  all  with  the  simple  ancestral  spirit 
or  sacred  stone  from  which  in  the  last  resort  he  appears  to 
be  descended.  Yet  even  here,  we  must  beware  of  being 
misled  by  too  personal  an  outlook.  While  the  higher 
minds  in  Christendom  undoubtedly  conceive  of  the  Chris- 
tian God  in  terms  of  Mansel  and  Martineau,  the  lower 
minds  even  among  ourselves  conceive  of  him  in  far  simpler 
and  more  material  fashions.  A  good  deal  of  enquiry 
among  ordinary  English  people  of  various  classes,  not  al- 
ways the  poorest,  convinces  me  that  to  large  numbers  of 
them  God  is  envisaged  as  possessing  a  material  human 
form,  more  or  less  gaseous  in  composition;  that,  in  spite 
of  the  Thirty-nine  Articles,  he  has  body,  parts,  and 
passions;  that  he  is  usually  pictured  to  the  mind's  eye  as 
about  ten  or  twelve  feet  high,  with  head,  hands,  eyes  and 
mouth,  used  to  see  with  and  speak  with  in  human  fashion; 
and  that  he  sits  on  a  throne,  like  a  king  that  he  is,  sur- 
rounded by  a  visible  court  of  angels  and  archangels. 
Italian  art  so  invariably  represents  him,  with  a  frank- 
ness   unknown    to    Protestant    Christendom.      Instead 


I   s'rtr 


1 

1 

f    i     '  r  ' 


'1 


; 


:>      l! 


410 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


of  being  in  all  places  at  once,  pervading  and  under- 
lying nature,  the  Deity  is  conceived  of  by  most  of  his 
worshippers  as  having  merely  the  power  of  annihilating 
space,  and  finding  himself  wherever  he  likes  at  a  given 
moment.  His  omniscience  and  omnipotence  are  readily 
granted;  but  his  abstractness  and  immateriality  are  not 
really  grasped  by  one  out  of  a  thousand  of  his  believers  in 
Britain. 

The  fact  is,  so  abstract  a  conception  as  the  highest 
theological  conception  of  God  cannot  be  realised  except 
symbolically,  and  then  for  a  few  moments  only,  in  com- 
plete isolation.  The  moment  God  is  definitely  thought  of 
in  connexion  with  any  cosmic  activity,  still  more  in  con- 
nexion with  any  human  need,  he  is  inevitably  thought  of 
on  human  analogies,  and  more  or  less  completely  anthro- 
pomorphised  in  the  brain  of  the  believer.  Being  by 
origin  an  offshoot  of  the  mind  of  man,  a  great  deified  hu- 
man being,  he  retains  necessarily  still,  for  all  save  a  few 
very  mystical  or  ontological  souls,  the  obvious  marks  of 
his  ultimate  descent  from  a  ghost  or  spirit.  Indeed,  on 
the  mental  as  opposed  to  the  bodily  side,  he  does  so  for  us 
all  ;  since  even  theologians  freely  ascribe  to  him  such 
human  feelings  as  love,  afifection,  a  sense  of  justice,  a  spirit 
of  mercy,  of  truth,  of  wisdom :  knowledge,  will,  the  powers 
of  intellect,  all  the  essential  and  fundamental  human 
faculties  and  emotions. 

Thus,  far  as  we  seem  to  have  travelled  from  our  base  in 
the  most  exalted  concepts  of  God,  we  are  nearer  to  it  still 
than  most  of  us  imagine.  Moreover,  in  spite  of  this  height 
to  which  the  highest  minds  have  raised  their  idea  of  the 
Deity,  as  the  creator,  sustainer,  and  mover  of  the  universe, 
every  religion,  however  monotheistic,  still  continues  to 
make  new  minor  gods  for  itself  out  of  the  dead  as  they 
die,  and  to  worship  these  gods  with  even  more  assiduous 
worship  than  it  bestows  upon  the  great  God  of  Christen- 
dom c  the  great  gods  of  the  central  pantheon.  And  the 
Christian  religion  makes  such  minor  deities  no  less  than 


THE  DEAD  MAN  ALWAYS  WORSHIPPED. 


.II 


all  Others.  The  fact  is,  the  religious  emotion  takes  its 
origin  from  the  affection  and  regard  felt  for  the  dead  by 
survivors,  mingled  with  the  hope  and  belief  that  they  may 
be  of  some  use  or  advantage,  temporal  or  spiritual,  to 
those  who  call  upon  them;  and  these  primitive  faiths  and 
feelings  remain  so  ingrained  in  the  very  core  of  humanity 
that  even  the  most  abstract  of  all  religions,  like  the  Protes- 
tant schism,  cannot  wholly  choke  them,  while  recrudes- 
cences of  the  original  creed  and  custom  spring  up  from 
time  to  time  in  the  form  of  spiritualism,  theosophy,  and 
other  vague  types  of  simple  ghost-worship. 

Most  advanced  religions,  however,  and  especially  Chris- 
tianity in  its  central,  true,  and  main  form  of  Catholicism, 
have  found  it  necessary  to  keep  renewing  from  time  to  time 
the  stock  of  minor  gods — here  arbitrarily  known  as  saints — 
much  as  the  older  religions  found  it  always  necessary  from 
year  to  year  to  renev/  the  foundation-gods,  the  corn  and 
wine  gods,  and  the  other  special  deities  of  the  manufac- 
tured order,  by  a  constant  supply  of  theanthropic  victims. 
What  I  wish  more  particularly  to  point  out  here,  however, 
is  that  the  vast  majority  of  places  of  worship  all  the  world 
over  are  still  erected,  as  at  the  very  beginning,  above  the 
body  of  a  dead  man  or  woman;  that  the  chief  objects  of 
worship  in  every  shrine  are  still,  as  always,  such  cherished 
bodies  of  dead  men  and  women;  and  that  the  primitive 
connexion  of  Religion  with  Death  has  never  for  a  moment 
been  practically  severed  in  the  greater  part  of  the  world, — 
not  even  in  Protestant  England  and  America. 

Mr.  William  Simpson  was  one  of  the  first  persons  to 
point  out  this  curious  underlying  connexion  between 
churches,  temples,  mosques,  or  topes,  and  a  tomb  or 
monument.  He  has  proved  his  point  in  a  very  full  man- 
ner, and  I  would  refer  the  reader  who  wishes  to  pursue 
this  branch  of  the  subject  at  length  to  his  interesting 
monographs.  In  this  work,  I  will  confine  my  attention 
mainly  to  the  continued  presence  of  this  death-element  in 
Christianity;  but  by  way  of  illustration,  I  will  preface  my 


\\ 


412 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


i 

1 

1;: 

•  ■  I, 


i    I  ■        ( 


■   1         ! 


) 


■\w 


U     %:■■ 


f;i 


remarks  by  a  few  stray  instances  picked  up  at  random 
from  the  neighbouring  and  interesting  field  of  Islam. 

There  is  no  religion  in  all  the  world  which  professes  to 
be  more  purely  monotheistic  in  character  than  Moham- 
medanism. The  unity  of  God,  in  the  very  strictest  sense, 
is  the  one  dogma  round  which  the  entire  creed  of  Islam 
centres.  More  than  any  other  cult,  it  represents  itself  as 
a  distinct  reaction  against  the  polytheism  and  supersti- 
tion of  surrounding  faiths.  The  isolation  of  Allah  is  its  one 
great  dogma.  If,  therefore,  we  find  even  in  this  most 
monotheistic  of  existing  religious  systems  a  larg«e  element 
of  practically  polytheistic  survival — if  we  find  that  even 
here  the  Worship  of  the  Dead  remains,  as  a  chief  com- 
ponent in  religious  practice,  if  not  in  religious  theory,  we 
shall  be  fairly  entitled  to  conclude,  I  think,  that  such  con- 
stituents are  indeed  of  the  very  essence  of  religious  think- 
ing, and  we  shall  be  greatly  strengthened  in  the  conclu- 
sions at  which  we  previously  arrived  as  to  a  belief  in 
immortality  or  continued  life  of  the  dead  being  in  fact  the 
core  and  basis  of  worship  and  of  deity. 

Some  eight  or  ten  years  since,  when  I  first  came  practi- 
cally into  connexion  with  Islam  in  Algeria  and  Egypt,  I 
was  immediately  struck  by  the  wide  prevalence  among  the 
Mahommedan  population  of  forms  of  worship  for  which  I 
was  little  prepared  by  anything  I  had  previously  read  or 
heard  as  to  the  nature  and  practice  of  that  exclusive  and 
ostentatiously  monotheistic  faith.  Two  points,  indeed, 
forcibly  strike  any  visitor  who  for  the  first  time  has  the 
opportunity  of  observing  a  Mahommedan  community  in 
its  native  surroundings.  The  first  is  the  universal  habit 
on  the  part  of  the  women  of  visiting  the  cemeteries  and 
mourning  or  praying  over  the  graves  of  their  relations  on 
Friday,  the  sacred  day  of  Islam.  The  second  is  the  fre- 
quency of  Koubbas,  or  little  whitewashed  mosque- 
tombs  erected  over  the  remains  of  Marabouts,  fakeers,  or 
local  saints,  which  form  the  real  centres  for  the  relisrion 
and  worship  of  every  village.     Islam,  in  practice,  is  a  re- 


CORPSE-WORSHIP  IN  ISLAM. 


413 


ndom 


ligion  of  pilgrimages  to  the  tombs  of  the  dead.  In 
Algeria,  every  hillside  is  dotted  over  with  these  pic- 
turesque little  whitewashed  domes,  each  overshadowed 
by  its  sacred  date-palm,  each  surrounded  by  its  small 
walled  enclosure  or  temenos  of  prickly  pear  or  agave,  and 
each  attended  by  its  local  ministrant,  who  takes  charge  of 
the  tomb  and  of  the  alms  of  the  faithful.  Holy  body, 
sacred  stone,  tree,  well,  and  priest — not  an  element  of  the 
original  cult  of  the  dead  is  lacking.  Numerous  pilgrim- 
ages are  made  to  these  koubbas  by  the  devout:  and  on 
Friday  evenings  the  little  courtyards  are  almost  invariably 
thronged  by  a  crowd  of  eager  and  devoted  worshippers. 
Within,  the  bones  of  the  holy  man  lie  preserved  in  a  frame 
hung  about  with  rosaries,  pictures,  and  other  oblations  of 
his  ardent  disciples,  exactly  as  in  the  case  of  Roman 
Catholic  chapels.  The  saint,  in  fact,  is  quite  as  much  an 
institution  of  monotheistic  Islam  as  of  any  other  religion 
with  which  I  am  practically  acquainted. 

These  two  peculiarities  of  the  cult  of  Islam  strike  a 
stranger  immediately  on  the  most  casual  visit.  When  he 
comes  to  look  at  the  matter  more  closely,  however,  he 
finds  also  that  most  of  the  larger  mosques  in  the  principal 
towns  are  themselves  similarly  built  to  contain  and  en- 
shrine the  bones  of  saintly  personages,  more  or  less 
revered  in  their  immediate  neighbourhood.  Some  of  these 
are  indeed  so  holy  that  their  bones  have  been  duplicated 
exactly  like  the  wood  of  the  true  cross,  and  two  tombs  have 
been  built  in  separate  places  where  the  whole  or  a  portion 
of  the  supposed  remains  are  said  to  be  buried.  I  will  only 
specify  as  instances  of  such  holy  tombs  the  sacred  city  of 
Kerouan  in  Tunisia,  which  ranks  second  to  Mecca  and 
Medina  alone  in  the  opinion  of  all  devout  western  Mo- 
hammedans. Here,  the  most  revered  building  is  the 
shrine  of  "  The  Companion  of  the  Prophet,"  who  lies 
within  a  catafalque  covered  with  palls  of  black  velvet  and 
silver — as  funereal  a  monument  as  is  known  to  me  any- 
where.    Close  by  stands  the  catafalque  of  an  Indian  saint: 


'tv, 


414 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


'.I 


I  ■  I 


(,. 

t  . 

it 

r  .  Ill  n  ; 

.     1 

!    : 

while  other  holy  tomb-mosques  abound  in  the  city.     In 
Algiers  town,  the  holiest  place  is  similarly  the  mosque- 
tomb  of  Sidi  Abd-er-Rahman,  which  contains  the  shrine 
and  body  of  that  saint,  who  died  in  1471.     Around  him, 
so  as  to  share  his  sacred  burial-place  (like  the  Egyptians 
who  wished  to  be  interred  with  Osiris),  lie  the  bodies  of 
several  Deys  and  Pashas.       Lights  are  kept  constantly 
burning  at  the  saint's  tomb,  which  is  hung  with  variously- 
coloured  drapery,  after  the  old  Semitic  fashion,  while  ban- 
ners and  ostrich-eggs,  the  gifts  of  the  faithful,  dangle 
ostentatiously  round  it  from  the  decorated  ceiling.     Still 
more  sacred  in  its  way  is  the  venerable  shrine  of  Sidi  Okba 
near  Biskra,  one  of  the  most  ancient  places  of  worship 
in  the  Mahommedan  world.     The  tomb  of  the  great  saint 
stands  in  a  chantry,  screened  ofif  from  the  noble  mosque 
which  forms  the  ante-chamber,  and  is  hung  round  with  silk 
and  other  dainty  offerings.     On  the  front  an  inscription 
in  very  early  Cufic  characters  informs  us  that  "  This  is  the 
tomb  of  Okba,  son  of  Nafa:  May  Allah  have  mercy  upon 
him."     The  mosque  is  a  famous  place  of  pilgrimage,  and 
a  belief  obtains  that  when  the  Sidi  is  rightly  invoked,  a 
certain  minaret  in  its  front  will  nod  in  acceptance  of  the 
chosen  worshipper.       I  could  multiply  instances  indefi- 
nitely, but  refrain  on  purpose.     All  the  chief  mosques  at 
Tlemgen,    Constantine,    and    the    other    leading    North 
African  towns  similarly  gather  over  the  bodies  of  saints 
or  marabouts,  who  are  invoked  in  prayer,  and  to  whom 
every  act  of  worship  is  offered. 

All  over  Islam  we  get  such  holy  grave-mosques.  The 
tomb  of  the  Prophet  at  Medina  heads  the  list:  with  the 
equally  holy  tomb  of  his  daughter  Fatima.  Among  the 
Shiahs,  Ali's  grave  at  Nejef  and  Hoseyn's  grave  at 
Kerbela  are  as  sacred  as  that  of  the  Prophet  at  Medina. 
The  shrines  of  the  Imams  are  much  adored  in  Persia.  The 
graves  of  the  peers  in  India,  the  Ziarets  of  the  fakeers  in 
Afghanistan,  show  the  same  tendency.     In  Palestine,  says 


CORPSE-WORSHIP  IN  MODERN  EGYPT. 


415 


ity.  In 
nosque- 
;  shrine 
nd  him, 
l^yptians 
odies  of 
nstantly 
riously- 
ile  ban- 
dangle 

r.       Still 

ii  Okba 
worship 
at  saint 
mosque 
^ith  silk 
:ription 
is  is  the 
:y  upon 
g^e,  and 
Dked,  a 
I  of  the 

indefi- 
ques  at 

North 
I  saints 

whom 

1.  The 
ith  the 
ng  the 
ave  at 
ledina. 
I.  The 
eers  in 
le,  says 


Major   Conder,    worship   at    the   tombs   of   local    saints 
**  represents  the  real  religion  of  the  peasant." 

I  had  originally  intended,  indeed,  to  include  in  this  work 
a  special  chapter  on  these  survivals  in  Islam,  a  vast  num- 
ber of  which  I  have  collected  in  various  places;  but  my 
book  has  already  swelled  to  so  much  larger  dimensions 
than  I  had  originally  contemplated  that  I  am  compelled 
reluctantly  to  forego  this  disquisition. 

One  word,  however,  must  be  given  to  Egypt,  where  the 
cult  of  the  dead  was  always  so  marked  a  feature  in  the  de- 
veloped religion,  and  where  neither  Christianity  nor  Islam 
has  been  able  to  obscure  this  primitive  tendency.  Nothing 
is  more  noticeable  in  the  Nile  Valley  than  the  extraordi- 
nary way  in  which  the  habits  and  ideas  as  to  burial  and  the 
preservation  of  the  dead  have  survived  in  spite  of  the 
double  and  rapid  alteration  in  religious  theory.     At  Sak- 
karah  and  Thebes,  one  is  familiar  with  the  streets  and 
houses  of  tombs,  regularly  laid  out  so  as  to  form  in  the 
strictest  sense  a  true  Necropolis,  or  city  of  the  dead.     Just 
outside  Cairo,  on  the  edge  of  the  desert,  a  precisely  similar 
modern  Necropolis  exists  to  this  day,  regularly  planned 
in  streets  and  quarters,  with  the  tomb  of  each  family 
standing  in  its  own  courtyard  or  enclosure,  and  often 
very   closely   resembling  the   common   round-roofed   or 
domed  Egyptian  houses.     In  this  town  of  dead  bodies, 
every  distinction  of  rank  and  wealth  may  now  be  observed. 
The  rich  are  buried  under  splendid  mausolea  of  great 
architectural  pretensions;  the  poor  occupy  humble  tombs 
just  raised  above  the  surface  of  the  desert,  and  marked 
at  head  and  foot  with  rough  and  simple  Egyptian  tomb- 
stones.    Still,  the  entire  aspect  of  such  a  cemetery  is  the 
aspect  of  a  town.     In  northern  climates,  the  dead  sleep 
their  last  sleep  under  grassy  little  tumuli,  wholly  unhke  the 
streets  of  a  city:  in  Egypt,  to  this  day,  the  dead  occupy, 
as  in  life,  whole  lanes  and  alleys  of  eternal  houses.     Even 
the  spirit  which  produced  the  Pyramids  and  the  Tombs 
of  the  Kings  is  conspicuous  in  modern  or  mediaeval  Cairo 


TTr 


416 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


• 


in  the  taste  which  begot  those  vast  domed  mosques 
known  as  the  Tombs  of  the  KhaUfs  and  the  Tombs  of  the 
Mamelooks.  Whatever  is  biggest  in  the  neighbourhood 
of  ancient  Memphis  turns  out  on  examination  to  be  the 
last  resting-place  of  a  Dead  Man,  and  a  place  of  worship. 

Almost  every  one  of  the  great  mosques  of  Cairo  is  either 
a  tomb  built  for  himself  by  a  ruler — and  this  is  the  more 
frequent  case — or  else  the  holy  shrine  of  some  saint  of 
Islam.  It  is  characteristic  of  Egypt,  however,  where  king 
and  god  have  always  been  so  closely  combined,  that  while 
elsewhere  the  mosque  is  usually  the  prayer-tomb  of  a  holy 
man,  in  Cairo  it  is  usually  the  memorial-temple  of  a 
Sultan,  an  Emeer,  a  viceroy,  or  a  Khedive.  It  is  inte- 
resting to  find,  too,  after  all  we  have  seen  as  to  the  special 
sanctity  of  the  oracular  head,  that  perhaps  the  holiest  of  all 
these  mosques  contains  the  head  of  Hoseyn,  the  grandson 
of  the  Prophet.  A  ceremonial  washing  is  particularly 
mentioned  in  the  story  of  its  translation.  The  mosque  ^ 
Sultan  Hassan,  with  its  splendid  mausoleum,  is  a  pe 
liarly  fine  example  of  the  temple-tombs  of  Cairo. 

I  will  not  linger  any  longer,  however,  in  the  precincts 
of  Islam,  further  than  to  mention  the  significant  fact  that 
the  great  central  object  of  worship  for  the  Mahommedan 
world  is  the  Kaaba  at  Mecca,  which  itself,  as  Mr.  William 
Simpson  long  ago  pointed  out,  bears  obvious  traces  of 
being  at  once  a  tomb  and  a  sacred  altar-stone.  Sir 
Richard  Burton's  original  sketch  of  this  mystic  object 
shows  it  as  a  square  and  undecorated  temple-tomb, 
covered  throughout  with  a  tasselled  black  pall — a  most 
funereal  object — the  so-called  "  sacred  carpet."  It  is,  in 
point  of  fact,  a  simple  catafalque.  As  the  Kaaba  was 
adopted  direct  by  Mohammad  from  the  early  Semitic 
heathenism  of  Arabia,  and  as  it  must  always  have  been 
treated  with  the  same  respect,  I  do  not  think  we  can  avoid 
the  obvious  conclusion  that  this  very  ancient  tomb  has 
been  funereally  draped  in  the  self-same  manner,  like  those 
of  Biskra,  Algiers,  and  Kerouan,  from  the  time  of  its  first 


!  ! , 


T 


CORrsn-U'ORSllIP  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


417 


erection.  This  case  thus  throws  Hght  on  the  draping  of 
the  aslicra,  as  do  also  the  many-coloured  draperies  and 
hangings  of  saints'  catafalques  in  Algeria  and  Tunis. 

Nor  can  I  resist  a  passing  mention  of  the  Moharram 
festival,  which  is  said  to  be  the  commemoration  of  the 
death  of  Iloseyn,  the  son  of  Ali  (whose  holy  head  is  pre- 
served at  Cairo).  This  is  a  rude  piece  of  acting,  in  which 
the  events  supposed  to  be  connected  with  the  death  of 
Hoseyn  are  graphically  represented;  and  it  ends  with  a 
sacred  Adonis-like  or  Osiris-like  procession,  in  which  the 
body  of  the  saint  is  carried  and  mourned  over.  The  fu- 
neral is  the  grand  part  of  the  performance;  catafalques  are 
constructed  for  the  holy  corpse,  covered  with  green  and 
gold  tinsel — the  green  being  obviously  a  last  reminiscence 
of  the  god  of  vegetation.  In  Bombay,  after  the  dead 
body  and  shrine  have  been  carried  through  the  streets 
amid  weeping  and  wailing,  they  are  finally  thrown  into 
the  sea,  like  King  Carnival,  i  think  we  need  hardly  doubt 
that  here  we  have  an  evanescent  relic  of  the  rites  of  the 
corn-god,  ending  in  a  rain-charm,  and  very  closely  resem- 
bling those  of  Adonis  and  Osiris. 

But  if  in  Islam  the  great  objects  of  worship  are  the 
Kaaba  tomb  at  Mecca  and  the  Tomb  of  the  Prophet  at 
Medina,  so  the  most  holy  spot  in  the  world  for  Christen- 
dom is — the  Holy  Sepulchre.  It  was  for  possession  of 
that  most  sacred  place  of  pilgrimage  that  Christians 
fought  Moslems  through  the  middle  ages;  and  it  is  there 
that  while  faith  in  the  human  Christ  was  strong  and  vigor- 
ous the  vast  majority  of  the  most  meritorious  pilgrimages 
continued  to  be  directed.  To  worship  at  the  tomb  of  the 
risen  Redeemer  was  the  highest  hope  of  the  devout 
mediaeval  Christian.  Imitations  of  the  Holy  Sepulchre 
occur  in  abundance  all  over  Europe  :  one  exists  at  S. 
Stefano  in  Bologna;  another,  due  to  the  genius  of  Alberti, 
is  well  known  in  the  Ruccellai  chapel  at  Florence.  I  need 
hardly  recall  the  Sacro  Monte  at  Varallo. 

For   the   most   part,   however,   in   Christendom,    and 


4i8 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


especially  in  those  parts  of  Christendom  remote  from 
Palestine,  men  contented  themselves  with  nearer  and 
more  domestic  saints.  From  a  very  early  date  we  see  in 
the  catacombs  the  growth  of  this  practice  of  offering  up 
prayer  by  (or  to)  the  bodies  of  the  Dead  who  slept  in 
Christ.  A  chapel  or  capella,  as  Dean  Burgon  has  pointed 
out,  meant  originally  an  arched  sepulchre  in  the  walls  of 
the  catacombs,  at  which  prayer  was  afterwards  habitu- 
ally made:  and  above-ground  chapels  were  modelled, 
later  on,  upon  the  pattern  of  these  ancient  underground 
shrines.  I  have  alluded  briefly  in  my  second  chapter  to 
the  probable  origin  of  the  cruciform  church  from  two  gal- 
leries of  the  catacombs  crossing  one  another  at  right 
angles  ;  the  High  Altar  stands  there  over  the  body  or 
relics  of  a  Dead  Saint;  and  the  chapels  represent  other 
minor  tombs  grouped  like  niches  in  the  catacombs  around 
it.  A  chapel  is  thus,  as  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  phrases  it, 
"a  tomb  within  a  tomb";  and  a  great  cathedral  is  a 
serried  set  of  such  cumulative  tombs,  one  built  beside  the 
other.  Sometimes  the  chapels  are  actual  graves,  soine- 
times  they  are  cenotaphs;  but  the  connexion  with  death 
is  always  equally  evident.  On  this  subject,  T  would  refer 
the  reader  again  to  Mr.  Spencer's  pages. 

Sa  long  as  Christianity  was  proscribed  at  Rome  and 
throughout  the  empire,  the  worship  of  the  dead  must  have 
gone  on  only  silently,  and  must  have  centred  in  the  cata- 
combs or  by  the  graves  of  saints  and  martyrs — the  last- 
named  being  practically  mere  Christian  successors  of  the 
willing  victims  of  earlier  religions.  "  To  be  counted 
worthy  to  suffer  "  was  the  heart's  desire  of  every  earnest 
Christian — as  it  still  is  among  fresh  and  living  sects  like 
the  Salvation  Army;  and  the  creed  of  self-sacrifice,  whose 
very  name  betrays  its  human-victim  origin,  was  all  but 
universal.  When  Christianity  had  triumphed,  however,  and 
gained  not  only  official  recognition  but  official  honour, 
the  cult  of  the  martyrs  and  the  other  faithful  dead  became 
with  Christian  Rome  a  perfect  passion.     The  Holy  Inno- 


w 


CORPSE-WORSHIP  AT  ROME. 


419 


cents,  St.  Stephen  Protomr.rtyr,  the  nameless  martyrs  of 
the  Ten  Persecutions,  together  with  Polycarp,  Vivia  Per- 
petua,  Felicitas,  Ignatius  and  all  the  rest,  came  to  receive 
from  the  church  a  form  of  veneration  which  only  the  nice 
distinctions  of  the  theological  mind  could  enable  us  to 
discriminate  from  actual  worship.  The  great  procession 
of  the  slain  for  Christ  in  the  mosaics  of  Sant'  Apollinare 
Nuovo  at  Ravenna  gives  a  good  comprehensive  list  of  the 
more  important  of  these  earliest  saints  (at  least  for  Aryan 
worshippers)  headed  by  St.  Martin,  St.  Clement,  St. 
Justin,  St.  Lawrence,  and  St.  Hippolytus.  Later  on 
came  the  more  mythical  and  poetic  figures,  derived  appa- 
rently from  heathen  gods — St.  Catharine,  St.  Barbara, 
St.  George,  St.  Christopher.  These  form  as  they  go  a 
perfect  new  pantheon,  circling  round  the  figures  of  Christ 
himself,  and  his  mother  the  Madonna,  who  grows  quickly 
in  turn,  by  absorption  of  Isis,  Astarte,  and  Artemis,  into 
the  Queen  of  Heaven. 

The  love-feasts  or  agapce  of  the  early  Christians  were 
usually  held,  in  the  catacombs  or  elsewhere,  above  the 
bodies  of  the  martyrs.  Subsequently,  the  remains  of  the 
sainted  dead  were  transferred  to  lordly  churches  without, 
like  Sant'  Agnese  and  San  Paolo,  where  they  were  de- 
posited under  the  altar  or  sacred  stone  thus  consecrated, 
from  whose  top  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ  was  dis- 
tributed in  the  Eucharist.  As  early  as  the  foii^th  century, 
we  know  that  no  church  was  complete  without  some  such 
relic;  and  the  passion  for  martyrs  spread  so  greatly  from 
that  period  onward  that  at  one  time  no  less  than  2300 
corpses  of  holy  men  together  were  buried  at  S.  Prassede. 
It  is  only  in  Ronie  itself  that  the  full  importance  of  this 
martyr-worship  can  now  be  sufficiently  understood,  or  the 
large  part  which  it  played  in  the  development  of  Christian- 
ity adequately  recognised.  Perhaps  the  easiest  way  for 
the  Protestant  reader  to  put  himself  in  touch  with  this 
side  of  the  subject  is  to  peruse  the  very  interesting  and 


!l  '    .1     1     '■ 


420 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


imui 


' '.  i 


{.  ^i 

;  r 

i       ■ 

'^<: 

1  ■  ■  -ir  ! 

i         ,         W     : 

■1 

graphic  account  given  in  the  second  volume  of  Mrs. 
Jameson's  Sacred  and  Legendary  Art. 

I  have  room  for  a  few  illustrative  examples  only. 

When  St.  Ambrose  founded  his  new  church  at  Milan,  he 
wished  to  consecrate  it  with  some  holy  relics.  In  a  vision, 
he  beheld  two  young  men  in  shining  clothes,  and  it  was 
revealed  to  him  that  these  were  hoi)'-  martyrs  whose  bodies 
lay  near  the  spot  where  he  lived  in  the  city.  He  dug  for 
them,  accordingly,  and  found  two  bodies,  which  proved 
to  be  those  of  two  saints,  Gervasius  and  Protasius,  who 
had  suffered  for  the  faith  in  the  reign  of  Nero.  They  were 
installed  in  the  new  basilica  Ambrose  had  built  at  Milan. 
Churches  in  their  honour  now  exist  all  over  Christendom, 
the  best  known  being  those  at  Venice  and  Paris. 

The  body  of  St.  Agnes,  saint  and  martyr,  who  is  always 
represented  with  that  familiar  emblem,  the  lamb  which  she 
duplicates,  lies  in  a  sarcophagus  under  the  High  A.ltar  of 
Sant'  Agnese  beyond  the  Porta  Pia,  where  a  basilica  was 
erected  over  the  remains  by  Constantine  the  Great,  only  a 
few  years  after  the  martyrdom  of  the  saint.  The  body  of 
St.  Cecilia  lies  similarly  in  the  church  of  Santa  Cecilia  in 
Trastevere.  In  this  last-named  case,  the  original  house 
where  Cecilia  was  put  to  death  is  said  to  have  been  conse- 
crated as  a  place  of  worship,  after  the  very  early  savage 
fashion,  the  room  where  she  suffered  possessing  especial 
sanctity.  Pope  Symmachus  held  a  council  there  in  the 
year  500.  This  earliest  church  having  fallen  into  ruins 
during  the  troubles  of  the  barbarians.  Pope  Paschal  I.,  the 
great  patron  of  relic-hunting,  built  a  new  one  in  honour  of 
the  saint  in  the  ninth  century.  While  engaged  in  the 
work,  he  had  a  dream  (of  a  common  pattern),  when 
Cecilia  appeared  to  him  and  showed  him  the  place  in 
which  she  lay  buried.  Search  was  made,  and  the  body 
was  found  in  the  catacombs  of  St.  Calixtus,  wrapped  in  a 
shroud  of  gold  tissue,  while  at  her  feet  lay  a  linen  cloth 
dipped  in  the  sacred  blood  of  her  martyrdom.  Near  her 
were  deposited  the  remains  of  Valerian,  Tiburtius,  and 


RELICS  OF  SAINTS. 


421 


Maximus,  all  of  whom  are  more  or  less  mixed  up  in  her 
legend.  The  body  was  removed  to  the  existing  church, 
the  little  room  where  the  saint  died  being  preserved  as  a 
chapel.  In  the  sixteenth  century,  the  sacred  building  was 
again  repaired  and  restored  in  the  atrocious  taste  of  the 
time;  and  the  sarcophagus  was  opened  before  the  eyes  of 
several  prelates,  including  Cardinal  Baronius.  The  body 
was  found  entire,  and  was  then  replaced  in  the  silver  shrine 
in  which  it  still  reposes.  Almost  every  church  in  Rome 
has  thus  its  entire  body  of  a  patron  saint,  oftenest  a  martyr 
of  the  early  persecutions. 

In  many  similar  cases,  immense  importance  is  attached 
to  the  fact  that  the  body  remains,  as  the  phrase  goes,  "  un- 
corrupted  ";  and  I  may  mention  in  this  connexion  that  in 
the  frequent  representations  of  the  Raising  of  Lazarus, 
which  occur  as  "  emblems  of  the  resurrection  "  in  the  cata- 
combs, the  body  of  Lazarus  is  represented  as  a  mummy, 
often  enclosed  in  what  seems  to  be  a  mummy-case.  In- 
deed, it  is  most  reminiscent  of  the  Egyptian  Osiris  images. 

I  pass  on  to  other  and  more  interesting  instances  of 
survival  in  corpse-worship. 

The  great  central  temple  of  the  Catholic  Church  is  St. 
Peter's  at  Rome.  The  very  body  of  the  crucified  saint  lies 
enshrined  under  the  high  altar,  in  a  sarcophagus  brought 
from  the  catacomb  near  S.  Sebastiano.  Upon  this  Rock, 
St.  Peter's  and  the  Catholic  Church  are  founded.  Ana- 
cletus,  the  successor  of  Clement,  built  a  monument  over 
the  bones  of  the  blessed  Peter;  and  if  Peter  be  a  historical 
person  at  all,  1  see  no  reason  to  doubt  that  his  veritable 
body  actually  lies  there.  St.  Paul  shares  with  him  in  the 
same  shrine;  but  only  half  the  two  corpses  now  repose 
within  the  stately  Confessio  in  the  Sacristy  of  the  papal 
basilica  :  the  other  portion  of  St.  Peter  consecrates  the 
Lateran;  the  other  portion  of  St.  Paul  gives  sanctity  to 
San  Paolo  fuori  le  Mura. 

Other  much  venerated  bodies  at  Rome  are  those  of  the 
Quattro  Coronati,  in  the  church  of  that  name;  S.  Praxe- 


;i  ,  v-*-m- 


I 


422 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


dis  and  St.  Pudentiana  in  their  respective  churches;  St. 
Cosmo  and  St.  Damian;  and  many  more  too  numerous 
to  mention.  Several  of  the  Roman  churches,  like  San 
Clemente,  stand  upon  the  site  of  the  house  of  the  saint  to 
whom  they  are  dedicated,  or  whose  body  they  preserve, 
thus  recalling  the  early  New  Guinea  practice.  Others 
occupy  the  site  of  his  alleged  martyrdom,  or  enclose  the 
pillar  to  which  he  was  fastened.  The  legends  of  all  these 
Roman  saints  are  full  of  significant  echoes  of  paganism. 
The  visitor  to  Rome  who  goes  the  round  of  the  churches 
and  catacombs  with  an  unprejudiced  mind  must  be  asto- 
nished to  find  how  sites,  myths,  and  ceremonies  recall  at 
every  step  familiar  heathen  holy  places  or  stories.  In  the 
single  church  of  San  Zaccaria  at  Venice,  again,  I  found 
the  bodies  of  St.  Zacharias  (father  of  John  the  Baptist), 
St.  Sabina,  St.  Tarasius,  Sts.  Nereus  and  Achilles,  and 
many  other  saints  too  numerous  to  mention. 

How  great  importance  was  attached  to  the  possession  of 
the  actual  corpse  or  mummy  of  a  saint  we  see  exception- 
ally well  indeed  in  this  case  of  Venice.  The  bringing  of 
the  corpse  or  mummy  of  St.  Mark  from  Alexandria  to  the 
lagoons  was  long  considered  the  most  important  event 
in  the  history  of  the  Republic ;  the  church  in  which  it  was 
housed  is  the  noblest  in  Christendom,  and  contains  an  end- 
less series  of  records  of  the  connexion  of  St.  Mark  with 
the  city  and  people  that  so  royally  received  him.  The 
soul,  as  one  may  see  in  Tintoret's  famous  picture,  flitted 
over  sea  with  the  body  to  Venice,  warned  the  sailors  of 
danger  by  the  way,  and  ever  after  protected  the  hospitable 
Republic  in  all  its  enterprises.  One  must  have  lived  long 
in  the  city  of  the  Lagoons  and  drunk  in  its  very  spirit  in 
order  to  know  how  absolutely  it  identified  itself  with  the 
Evangelist  its  patron.  "  Pax  tibi,  Marce,  evangelista 
meus,"  is  the  motto  on  its  buildings.  The  lion  of  St. 
Mark  stood  high  in  the  Piazzetta  to  be  seen  of  all;  he  re- 
curs in  every  detail  of  sculpture  or  painting  in  the  Doges' 
Palace  and  the  public  edifices  of  the  city.     The  bodv  that 


THE  HELPERS  OF  VENICE. 


423 


lay  under  the  pall  of  gold  in  the  great  church  of  the 
Piazza  was  a  veritable  Palladium,  a  very  present  help  in 
time  of  trouble.  It  was  no  mere  sentiment  or  fancy  to  the 
Venetians  ;  they  knew  that  they  possessed  in  their  own 
soil,  and  under  their  own  church  domes,  the  body  and  soul 
of  the  second  of  the  evangehsts. 

Nor  was  that  the  only  important  helper  that  Venice 
could  boast.  She  contained  also  the  body  of  St.  George 
at  San  Giorgio  Maggiore,  and  the  body  of  St.  Nicholas  at 
San  Niccolo  di  Lido.  The  beautiful  legend  of  the  Doge 
and  the  Fisherman  (immortalised  for  us  by  the  pencil  of 
Paris  Bordone  in  one  of  the  noblest  pictures  the  world  has 
ever  seen)  tells  us  how  the  three  great  guardian  saints, 
St.  Mark,  St.  George,  and  St.  Nicholas,  took  a  gondola 
one  day  from  their  respective  churches,  and  rowed  out  to 
sea  amid  a  raging  storm  to  circumvent  the  demons  who 
were  coming  in  a  tempest  to  overwhelm  Venice.  A  fourth 
saint,  of  far  later  date,  whom  the  Venetians  also  carried  oflf 
by  guile,  was  St.  Roch  of  Montpelier.  This  holy  man  was  a 
very  great  sanitary  precaution  against  the  plague,  to  which 
the  city  was  much  exposed  through  its  eastern  commerce. 
So  the  men  of  Venice  simply  stole  the  body  by  fraud  from 
Montpelier,  and  built  in  its  honour  the  exquisite  church 
and  Scuola  di  San  Rocco,  the  great  museum  of  the  art  of 
Tintoret.  The  fact  that  mere  possession  of  the  holy 
body  counts  in  itself  for  much  could  not  be  better  shown 
than  by  these  forcible  abductions. 

The  corpse  of  St.  Nicholas,  who  was  a  highly  revered 
bishop  of  Myra  in  Lycia,  lies,  as  I  said,  under  the  high 
altar  of  San  Niccolo  di  Lido  at  Venice.  But  another  and 
more  authentic  body  of  the  same  great  saint,  the  patron 
of  sailors  and  likewise  of  schoolboys,  lies  also  under  the 
high  altar  of  the  magnificent  basilica  of  San  Nicola  at 
Bari,  from  which  circumstance  the  holy  bishop  is  generally 
known  as  St.  Nicolas  of  Bari.  A  miraculous  fluid,  the 
Manna  di  Bari,  highly  prized  by  the  pious,  exudes  from 
the  remains.     A  gorgeous  cathedral  rises  over  the  sepul- 


424 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


*  n 


I'.    .' 


1^; 

1        ^'i        ■ 

!' 

1 

I  ' 


i 

I 


chre.     Such  emulous  duplication  of  bodies  and  relics  is 
extremely  common,  both  in  Christendom  and  in  Islam. 

I  have  made  a  point  of  visiting  the  shrines  of  a  vast 
number  of  leading  saints  in  various  parts  of  Italy;  and 
could  devote  a  volume  to  their  points  of  interest.  The 
corpse  of  St.  Augustine,  for  example,  lies  at  Pavia  in  a 
glorious  ark,  one  of  the  most  sumptuous  monuments  ever 
erected  by  the  skill  of  man,  as  well  as  one  of  the  loveliest. 
Padua  similarly  boasts  the  body  of  St.  Antony  of  Padua, 
locally  known  as  "  il  Santo,"  and  far  more  important  in  his 
own  town  than  all  the  rest  of  the  Christian  pantheon  put 
together.  The  many-domed  chur:h  erected  over  his  re- 
mains is  considerably  larger  than  St.  Mark's  at  Venice; 
and  the  actual  body  of  the  saint  itself  is  enclosed  in  an 
exquisite  marble  chapel,  designed  by  Sansovino,  and  en- 
riched with  all  the  noblest  art  of  the  Renaissance.  Do- 
minican monks  and  nuns  make  pilgrimages  to  Bologna, 
in  order  to  venerate  the  body  of  St.  Dominic,  who  died  in 
that  city,  and  whose  corpse  is  enclosed  in  a  magnificent 
sarcophagus  in  the  church  dedicated  to  him,  and  adorned 
with  exquisite  sculpture  by  various  hands  from  the  time  of 
Niccolo  Pisano  to  that  of  Michael  Angelo.  Siena  has  for 
its  special  glory  St.  Catherine  the  second — the  first  was 
the  mythical  princess  of  Alexandria;  and  the  house  of  that 
ecstatic  nun  is  still  preserved  intact  as  an  oratory  for  the 
prayers  of  the  pious.  Her  head,  laid  by  in  a  silver  shrine 
or  casket,  decorates  the  altar  of  her  chapel  in  San  Do- 
menico,  where  the  famous  frescoes  of  Sodoma  too  often 
usurp  the  entire  attention  of  northern  visitors.  Compare 
the  holy  head  of  Hoseyn  at  Cairo.  The  great  Franciscan 
church  at  Assisi,  once  more,  enshrines  the  remains  of  the 
founder  of  the  Franciscans,  which  formerly  reposed 
under  the  high  altar;  the  church  of  Santa  Maria  degli 
Angeli  below  it  encloses  the  little  hut  which  was  the  first 
narrow  home  of  the  nascent  order.  I  could  go  on  multi- 
plying such  instances  without  number;  I  hope  these  few 
will  suffice  to  make  the  Protestant  reader  feel  how  real  is 


HOLY  BODIES  IN  rjRIS. 


425 


relics  is 
Islam, 
f  a  vast 
aly;  and 
5t.  The 
via  in  a 
nts  ever 
oveliest. 

Padua, 
It  in  his 
eon  put 

his  re- 
Venice; 
d  in  an 
and  en- 
;.  Do- 
ologna, 
died  in 
nificent 
domed 
time  of 
has  for 
rst  was 
of  that 
for  the 

shrine 
m  Do- 
)  often 
►mpare 
iciscan 
of  the 
£posed 

degli 
le  first 
multi- 
se  few 
real  is 


1 


n 


the  reverence  still  paid  to  the  very  corpses  and  houses  of 
the  saints  in  Italy.  If  ever  he  was  present  at  Milan  on  the 
festa  of  San  Carlo  Borromeo,  and  saw  the  peasants  from 
neighbouring  villages  flock  in  hundreds  to  kiss  the  relics 
of  the  holy  man,  as  I  have  seen  them,  he  would  not  hesi- 
tate to  connect  much  current  Christianity  with  the  most 
primitive  forms  of  corpse-worship  and  mummy-worship. 

North  of  the  Alps,  again,  I  cannot  retrain  from  mention- 
ing a  few  salient  instances,  which  help  to  enforce  princi- 
ples already  enunciated.  At  Paris,  the  two  great  local 
saints  are  St.  Denis  and  Ste.  Genevieve.  St.  Denis  was 
the  first  bishop  of  Lutetia  and  of  the  Parisii:  he  is  said  to 
have  been  beheaded  with  his  two  companions  at  Mont- 
martre, — Mons  Martyrum.  He  afterwards  walked  with 
his  head  in  his  hands  from  that  point  (now  covered  by  the 
little  church  of  St.  Pierre,  next  door  to  the  new  basilica  of 
the  Sacre  Cceur),  to  the  spot  where  he  piously  desired  to 
be  buried.  A  holy  woman  named  Catulla  (note  that  last 
echo)  performed  the  final  rites  for  him  at  the  place  where 
the  stately  abbey-church  of  St.  Denis  now  preserves  his 
memory.  The  first  cathedral  on  the  spot  was  erected 
before  the  Prankish  invasion;  the  second,  built  by  Dago- 
bert,  was  consecrated  (as  a  vision  showed)  by  Christ  him- 
self, who  descended  for  the  purpose  from  heaven,  sur- 
rounded by  apostles,  angels,  and  St.  Denis.  The  actual 
head  or  skull  of  the  saint  was  long  preserved  in  the  basilica 
in  a  splendid  reliquary  of  solid  silver,  the  gift  of  Mar- 
guerite de  France,  just  as  Hoseyn's  head  is  still  preserved 
at  Cairo,  and  as  so  many  other  miraculous  or  oracular 
heads  are  kept  by  savages  or  barbarians  elsewhere.  In- 
deed, the  anthropological  enquirer  may  be  inclined  to  sup- 
pose that  the  severance  of  the  head  from  the  body  and  its 
preservation  above  ground,  after  the  common  fashion, 
gave  rise  later  to  the  peculiar  but  by  no  means  unique 
legend.  Compare  the  bear's  head  in  the  Aino  supersti- 
tion, as  well  as  the  oracular  German  and  Scandinavian 
Nithstangs. 


426 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


■'.    ; 


As  for  Ste.  Genevieve,  she  rested  first  in  the  church 
dedicated  to  her  on  the  site  now  occupied  by  the 
Pantheon,  which  still  in  part,  though  secularised,  pre- 
serves her  memory.  Her  body  (or  what  remains  of  it) 
lies  at  present  in  the  neighbouring  church  of  St.  Etienne 
du  Mont,  where  every  lover  of  Paris  surely  pays  his  de- 
votion to  the  shrine  in  the  most  picturesque  and  original 
building  which  the  city  holds,  whenever  he  passes  through 
the  domain  of  Ste.  Genevieve.  How  real  the  devotion  of 
the  people  still  is  may  be  seen  on  any  morning  of  the 
working  week,  and  still  more  during  the  octave  of  the 
saint's  fete-day. 

As  in  many  other  cases,  however,  the  remains  of  the 
virgin  patroness  of  Paris  have  been  more  than  once  re- 
moved from  place  to  place  for  safe  custody.  The  body 
was  originally  buried  in  the  crypt  of  the  old  abbey  church 
of  the  Holy  Apostles  on  the  lie  de  la  Cite.  When  the 
Normans  overran  the  country,  the  monks  carried  it  away 
with  them  in  a  wooden  box  to  a  place  of  safety.  As  soon 
as  peace  was  once  more  restored,  the  corpse  was  en- 
shrined in  a  splendid  cJiasse  ;  while  the  empty  tomb  was 
still  treated  with  the  utmost  reverence.  At  the  Revolu- 
tion, the  actual  bones,  it  is  said,  were  destroyed;  but  the 
sarcophagus  or  cenotaph  survived  the  storm,  and  was 
transferred  to  St.  Etienne.  Throughout  the  Neuvaine, 
thousands  of  the  faithful  still  flock  to  worship  it.  The 
sarcophagus  is  believed  even  now  to  contain  some  holy 
portions  of  the  saint's  body,  saved  from  the  wreck  by 
pious  adherents. 

Other  familiar  examples  will  occur  to  every  one,  such  as 
the  bones  of  the  Magi  or  Three  Kings,  preserved  in  a  re- 
liquary in  the  Cathedral  at  Cologne;  those  of  St.  Ursula 
and  the  ii,ooo  virgins;  those  of  St.  Stephen  and  St.  Law- 
rence at  Rome;  those  of  St.  Hubert,  disinterred  and  found 
uncorrupted,  at  the  town  of  the  same  name  in  the  Ar- 
dennes; and  those  of  St.  Longinus  in  his  chapel  at  Man- 
tua.    All  these  relics  and  bodies  perform  astounding  mira- 


CORPSE-WORSHIP  IN  BRITAIN, 


427 


I    ! 


cles,  and  all  have  been  the  centres  of  important  cults  for  a 
considerable  period. 

In  Britain,  from  the  first  stages  of  Christianity,  the  reve- 
rence paid  to  the  bodies  of  saints  was  most  marked,  and 
the  story  of  their  wanderings  forms  an  important  part  of 
our  early  annals.  Indeed,  I  dwell  so  long  upon  this  point 
because  few  northerners  of  the  present  day  can  fully  appre- 
ciate the  large  part  which  the  Dead  Body  plays  and  has 
played  for  many  centuries  in  Christian  worship.  Only 
those  who,  like  me,  have  lived  long  in  thoroughly  Catho- 
lic countries,  have  made  pilgrimages  to  numerous  famous 
shrines,  and  have  waded  through  reams  of  Anglo-Saxon 
and  other  early  mediaeval  documents,  can  really  under- 
stand this  phase  of  Christian  hagiology.  To  such  people 
it  is  abundantly  clear  that  the  actual  Dead  Body  of  some 
sainted  man  or  woman  has  been  in  many  places  the  chief 
object  of  reverence  for  millions  of  Christians  in  successive 
generations.  A  good  British  instance  is  found  in  the  case 
of  St.  Cuthbert's  corpse.  The  tale  of  its  wanderings  is 
too  long  to  be  given  here  in  full ;  it  should  be  read  in  any 
good  history  of  Durham.  I  epitomize  briefly.  The  body 
of  the  devoted  missionary  of  the  north  was  first  kept  for 
some  time  at  Lindisfarne.  When,  at  the  end  of  eleven 
years,  the  saint's  tomb  was  opened,  his  outer  form  was 
found  still  incorrupt:  and  so  for  more  than  800  years  it  was 
believed  to  remain.  It  rested  at  Lindisfarne  till  875,  when 
the  piratical  Danes  invaded  Northumbria.  The  monks, 
regarding  St.  Cuthbert  as  their  greatest  treasure,  fled  in- 
land, carrying  the  holy  body  with  them  on  their  own  shoul- 
ders. Such  translations  of  sacred  corpses  are  common  in 
Christian  and  heathen  history.  After  many  wanderings, 
during  which  it  was  treated  with  the  utmost  care  and  devo- 
tion, the  hallowed  body  found  an  asylum  for  a  while  at 
Chester-le-Street  in  883.  In  995,  it  was  transferred  to 
Ripon,  where  it  sanctified  the  minster  by  even  so  short  a 
sojourn;  but  in  the  same  year  it  went  forth  again,  on  its 
way  north  to  Lindisfarne.     On  the  way,  however,  it  mira- 


'% 


WM 


1 ,     1 


428 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


i  . 
1 


I      ,  r 


1 
I  ' . 

,  1 

i 

1. 

r  * 

1       / 

ff 


1^^ 


I  I 


it'      ! 

Ml    ! 


1  ;. 


culously  signified  (by  stubborn  refusal  to  move)  its  desire 
to  rest  for  ever  at  Durham — a  town  whose  strong  natural 
position  and  capacity  for  defence  does  honour  to  the 
saint's  military  judgment.  Here,  enclosed  in  a  costly 
shrine,  it  remained  working  daily  miracles  till  the  Refor- 
mation. The  later  grave  was  opened  in  1826,  when  the 
coffin  was  found  to  enclose  another,  made  in  1104:  and 
this  again  contained  a  third,  which  answered  the  descrip- 
tion of  the  sarcophagus  made  in  698,  when  the  saint  was 
raised  from  his  first  grave.  The  innermost  case  contained, 
not  indeed  the  uncorrupted  body  of  Cuthbert,  but  a  skele- 
ton, still  entire,  and  wrapped  in  fine  robes  of  embroidered 
silk.  No  story  known  to  me  casts  more  light  on  corpse- 
worship  than  does  this  one  when  read  with  all  the  graphic 
details  of  the  original  authorities. 

But  everywhere  in  Britain  we  get  similar  local  saints, 
whose  bodies  or  bones  performed  marvellous  miracles  and 
were  zealously  guarded  against  sacrilegious  intruders. 
Bede  himself  is  already  full  of  such  holy  corpses:  and  in 
later  days  they  increased  by  the  hundred.  St.  Aloan  at  St. 
Alban's,  the  protomartyr  of  Britain;  the  "white  hand" 
of  St.  Oswald,  that  when  all  else  perished  remained  white 
and  uncorrupted  becaused  blessed  by  Aidan;  St.  Ethel- 
dreda  at  Ely,  another  remarkable  and  illustrative  instance; 
Edward  the  Confessor  at  Westminster  Abbey;  these  are 
but  a  few  out  of  hundreds  of  examples  which  will  at  once 
occur  to  students  of  our  history.  And  I  will  add  that 
sometimes  the  legends  of  these  saints  link  us  on  unex- 
pectedly to  far  earlier  types  of  heathen  worship;  as  when 
we  read  concerning  St.  Edmund  of  East  Anglia,  the 
patron  of  Bury  St.  Edmund's,  that  Ingvar  the  viking  took 
him  by  force,  bound  him  to  a  tree,  scourged  him  cruelly, 
made  him  a  target  for  the  arrows  of  the  pagan  Danes,  and 
finally  beheaded  him.  Either,  I  say,  a  god-making  sacri- 
fice of  the  northern  heathens;  or,  failing  that,  a  reminis- 
cence, like  St.  Sebastian,  of  such  god-making  rites  as  pre- 


r 


HOLY  HEADS. 


429 


served  in  the  legends  of  ancient  martyrs.     Compare  here, 
once  more,  the  Aino  bear-sacrifice. 

But  during  the  later  middle  ages,  the  sacred  Body  of 
Britain,  above  all  others,  was  undoubtedly  that  of  Thomas 
A'Becket  at  Canterbury.  Hither,  as  we  know,  all  Eng- 
land went  on  pilgrimage;  and  nothing  could  more  fully 
show  the  rapidity  of  canonisation  in  such  cases  than  the 
fact  that  even  the  mighty  Henry  H.  had  to  prostrate  him- 
self before  his  old  enemy's  body  and  submit  to  a  public 
scourging  at  the  shrine  of  the  new-made  martyr.  For 
several  hundred  years  after  his  death  there  can  be  no 
doubt  at  all  that  the  cult  of  St.  Thomas  of  Canterbury  was 
much  the  most  real  and  living  worship  throughout  the 
whole  of  England;  its  only  serious  rivals  in  popular  favour 
being  the  cult  of  St.  Cuthbert  to  the  north  of  Humber, 
and  that  of  St.  Etheldreda  in  the  Eastern  Counties. 

Holy  heads  in  particular  were  common  in  Britain  before 
the  Reformation.  A  familiar  Scottish  case  is  that  of  the 
head  of  St.  Fergus,  the  apostle  of  BanfT  and  the  Pictish 
Highlands,  transferred  to  and  preserved  at  the  royal  seat 
of  Scone.  "  By  Sanct  Fergus  heid  at  Scone  "  was  the 
favourite  oath  of  the  Scotch  monarchs,  as  "  Par  Sainct 
Denys  "  was  that  of  their  French  contemporaries. 

In  almost  all  these  cases,  again,  and  down  to  the  present 
day,  popular  appreciation  goes  long  before  official  Roman 
canonisation.  Miracles  are  first  performed  at  the  tomb, 
and  prayers  are  answered;  an  irregular  cult  precedes  the 
formal  one.  Even  in  our  own  day,  only  a  few  weeks  after 
Cardinal  Manning's  death,  advertisements  appeared  in 
Catholic  papers  in  London,  giving  thanks  for  spiritual  and 
temporal  blessings  received  through  the  intervention  of 
Our  Lady,  the  saints,  "  and  our  beloved  Cardinal." 

This  popular  canonisation  has  often  far  outrun  the  regu- 
lar official  acceptance,  as  in  the  case  of  Joan  of  Arc  in 
France  at  the  present  day,  or  of  "  Maister  John  Schorn, 
that  blessed  man  born,"  in  the  Kent  of  the  middle  ages. 
Thus  countries  like  Wales  and  Cornwall  are  full  of  local 


n 


m 


'i-T 

i 


t  ,    I 


♦  ' 


i           ; 

1     !              ■ 
1     " 

.     At       ^'      ..-  L 

430 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


and  patriotic  saints,  often  of  doubtful  Catholicity,  like 
St.  Cadoc,  St.  Padcrn,  St.  Petrock,  St.  Piran,  St.  Ruan, 
and  St.  Illtyd,  not  to  mention  more  accepted  cases,  like 
St.  Asaph  and  St.  David.  The  fact  is,  men  have  every- 
where felt  the  natural  desire  for  a  near,  a  familiar,  a  recent, 
and  a  present  god  or  saint;  they  have  worshipped  rather 
the  aead  whom  they  loved  and  revered  themselves  than 
the  elder  gods  and  the  remoter  martyrs  who  have  no  body 
among  them,  no  personal  shrine,  no  local  associations,  no 
living  memories.  "  I  have  seen  in  Brittany,"  says  a 
French  correspondent  of  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's,  "  the 
tomb  of  a  pious  and  charitable  priest  covered  with  gar- 
lands: people  flocked  to  it  by  hundreds  to  pray  of  him 
that  he  would  procure  them  restoration  to  health,  and 
guard  over  their  children."  There,  with  the  Christian  ad- 
dition of  the  supreme  God,  we  get  once  more  the  root-idea 
of  leligion. 

I  should  like  to  add  that  beyond  such  actual  veneration 
of  the  bodies  of  saints  and  martyrs,  there  has  always  ex- 
isted a  definite  theory  in  the  Roman  church  that  no  altar 
can  exist  without  a  relic.  The  altar,  being  itself  a  monu- 
mental stone  needs  a  body  or  part  of  a  body  to  justify 
and  consecrate  it.  Dr.  Rock,  a  high  authority,  says  in  his 
Hierurgia,  "  By  the  r'^giilatior .  ot  the  Church  it  is  or- 
dained that  the  Holy  Sacrifice  of  the  Mass  be  offered  upon 
an  altar  which  contains  a  stone  consecrated  by  a  Bishop, 
enclosing  the  relics  of  some  saint  or  martyr;  and  be  co- 
vered with  three  linen  cloths  that  have  been  blessed  for 
that  purpose  with  an  appropriate  form  of  benediction."  The 
consecration  of  the  altar,  indeed,  is  considered  even  more 
serious  than  the  consecration  of  the  church  itself  ;  for 
without  the  stone  and  its  relic,  the  ceremony  of  tht-  Mass 
cannot  be  performed  at  all.  Even  when  Mass  has  to  be 
said  in  a  private  house,  the  priest  brings  a  consecrated 
stone  and  its  relic  along  vvith  him;  and  other  such  stones 
wcic  carried  in  the  retables  or  portable  altars  so  common 
in  military  expeditions  of  the  middle  ages.     The  church 


TUP.   ALTAR  A    TOMB. 


431 


ty,  like 
.  Ruan, 
$cs,  like 
i  every- 
L  recent, 
1  rather 
es  than 
10  body 
ions,  no 

says  a 
s,  "the 
ith  gar- 

of  him 
th,  and 
tian  ad- 
30t-idea 

leration 
ays  ex- 
io  altar 
inonu- 
justify 
s  in  his 

is  or- 
d  upon 
liishop, 
be  co- 
sed for 

"The 
h  more 

;  for 
r  MaFs 

to  be 
icrated 
stones 
•mmon 
church 


' 


is  thus  a  tomb,  with  chapel  tombs  around  it;  it  contains 
a  stone  monument  covering  a  dead  body  or  part  of  a  body; 
and  in  it  is  made  and  exhil)ited  the  Body  of  Christ,  in  the 
form  of  the  consecrated  and  transmuted  wafer. 

Not  only,  however,  is  the  altar  in  this  manner  a  reduced 
or  symbolical  tomb,  and  not  only  is  it  often  placed  above 
the  body  of  a  saint,  as  at  St.  Mark's  and  St.  Peter's,  but 
it  also  sometimes  consists  itself  of  a  stone  sarcophagus. 
One  such  sarcophagus  exists  in  the  Cathedral  at  St.  Malo; 
I  have  seen  othrr  coffin-shaped  altars  in  the  monastery  of 
La  Trappe  near  Algiers  and  elsewhere.  When,  however, 
the  altar  stands,  like  that  at  St.  Peter's,  above  the  actual 
body  of  a  saint,  it  does  not  require  to  contain  a  relic  ; 
otherwise  it  does.  That  is  to  say,  it  must  be  either  a  real 
or  else  an  attenuated  and  symbolical  sarcophagus. 

In  the  eastern  church,  a  sort  of  relic-bag,  called  an  Anti- 
mins,  is  necessary  for  the  proper  performance  of  the  Holy 
Eucharist.  It  consists  of  a  square  cloth,  laid  on  the  altar 
or  wrapped  up  in  its  coverings,  and  figured  with  a  picture 
representing  the  burial  of  Christ  by  Joseph  of  Arimathea 
and  the  Holy  Women.  This  brings  it  very  near  to  the 
Adonis  and  Hoseyn  ceremonies.  But  it  must  necessarily 
contain  some  saintly  relic. 

Apart  from  corpse-worship  and  relic-worship  in  the  case 
of  saints,  Catholic  Christendom  has  long  possessed  an  an- 
nual Commemoration  of  the  Dead,  the  Jotir  des  Morts, 
which  links  itself  on  directly  to  earlier  ancestor-worship. 
It  is  true,  this  commemoration  is  stated  officially,  and  no 
doubt  correctly,  to  owe  its  origin  (in  its  recognised  form) 
to  a  particular  historical  person,  Adam  de  Saint  Victor  : 
but  when  we  consider  how  universal  such  commemora- 
tions and  annual  dead-feasts  have  been  in  all  times  and 
places,  we  can  hardly  doubt  that  the  church  did  but  adopt 
and  sanctify  a  practice  which,  though  perhaps  accounted 
heathenish,  had  never  died  out  at  all  among  the  mass  of 
believers.  The  very  desire  to  be  buried  in  a  church  or 
churchyard,  and  all  that  it  implies,  link  on  Christian  usage 


I  fywf  i^i  iiinpp«.iTCp.-n^«««^im^ii  jMHaiiBiiijij    ipiii  miK^n^' 


432 


SURVIVALS  IN  CHRISTENDOM. 


m. 


f   i 


f.-v 


i.i  ■  i^; 


I  i  I 


here  once  more  to  primitive  corpse-worship.     Compare 
with  the  dead  who  sleep  with  Osiris.     In  the  middle  ages 
many  people  were  buried  in  chapels  containing  the  body 
(or  a  relic)  of  their  patron  saint. 

In  short,  from  first  to  last,  religion  never  gets  far  away 
from  these  its  earliest  and  profoundest  associations.  "  God 
and  immortality," — those  two  are  its  key-notes.  And 
those  two  are  one;  for  the  god  in  the  last  resort  is  nothing 
more  than  the  immortal  ghost,  etherealised  and  exten  ''ed. 

On  the  other  hand,  whenever  religion  travels  too  far 
afield  from  its  emotional  and  primal  base  in  the  cult  of  the 
nearer  dead,  it  must  either  be  constantly  renewed  by  fresh 
and  familiar  objects  of  worship,  or  it  tends  to  dissipate 
itself  into  mere  vague  pantheism.  A  new  god,  a  new 
saint,  a  "  revival  of  religion,"  is  continually  necessary. 
The  Sacrifice  of  the  Mass  is  wisely  repeated  at  frequent 
intervals;  but  that  alone  does  not  suffice;  men  want  the 
assurance  of  a  nearer,  a  more  familiar  deity.  In  our  own 
time,  and  especially  in  Protestant  and  sceptical  England 
and  America,  this  need  has  made  itself  felt  in  the  rise  of 
spiritualism  and  kindred  beliefs,  which  are  but  the  doctrine; 
of  the  ghost  or  shade  in  its  purified  form,  apart,  as  a  rule, 
from  the  higher  conception  of  a  supreme  ruler.  And  what 
is  Positivism  itself  save  the  veneration  of  the  mighty  dead, 
just  tinged  with  vague  ethical  yearnings  after  the  abstract 
service  of  living  humanity  ?  I  have  known  many  men  of 
intellect,  suffering  under  a  severe  bereavement — the  loss 
of  a  wife  or  a  dearly-loved  child — take  refuge  for  a  time 
either  in  spiritualism  or  Catholicism.  The  former  seems 
to  give  them  the  practical  assurance  of  actual  bodily  inter- 
course with  the  dead,  through  mediums  or  table-turning; 
the  latter  supplies  them  with  a  theory  of  death  which 
makes  reunion  a  probable  future  for  them.  This  desire 
for  direct  converse  with  the  dead  we  saw  exemplified  in  a 
very  early  or  primitive  stage  in  the  case  of  the  Mandan 
wives  who  talk  lovingly  to  their  husbands'  skulls;  it  pro- 
bably forms  the  basis  for  the  common  habit  of  keeping  the 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  DEAD. 


433 


head  while  burying  the  body,  whose  widespread  resuhs 
we  have  so  frequently  noticed.  I  have  known  two  in- 
stances of  modern  spiritualists  who  similarly  had  their 
wives'  bodies  embalmed,  in  order  that  the  spirit  might 
return  and  inhabit  them. 

Thus  the  Cult  of  the  Dead,  which  is  the  earliest  origin 
of  all  religion,  in  the  sense  of  worship,  is  also  the  last  relic 
of  the  religious  spirit  which  survives  the  gradual  decay  of 
faith  due  to  modern  scepticism.  To  this  cause  I  refer  on 
the  whole  the  spiritualistic  utterances  of  so  many  among 
our  leaders  of  modern  science.  They  have  rejected  re*^ 
ligion,  but  they  cannot  reject  the  inherited  and  ingrained 
religious  emotions. 


'h 

l# 

' ,       1' 

'    ■     !  1 

'1 

ft 


; 

: 

. 

15 

t 
1       \ 

^   ! 

1 

434 


CONCLUSION. 


CHAPTER  XX. 


CONCLUSION. 


And  now  we  have  reached  at  last  the  end  of  our  long^ 
and  toilsome  disquisition.  I  need  hardly  say,  to  those  who 
have  persisted  with  me  so  far,  that  I  do  not  regard  a  single 
part  of  it  all  as  by  any  means  final.  There  is  not  a  chapter 
in  this  book,  indeed,  which  I  could  not  have  expanded  to 
double  or  treble  its  present  length,  had  I  chosen  to  include 
in  it  a  tithe  of  the  evidence  I  have  gathered  on  the  sub- 
ject with  which  it  deals.  But  for  many  adequate  reasons, 
compression  was  imperative.  Some  of  the  greatest  trea- 
tises ever  written  on  this  profoundly  important  and  inte- 
resting question  have  met  with  far  less  than  the  attention 
they  deserved  because  they  were  so  bulky  and  so  over- 
loaded with  evidence  that  the  reader  could  hardly  see  the 
wood  for  the  trees;  he  lost  the  thread  of  the  argument  in 
the  mazes  of  example.  In  my  own  case,  I  had  or  believed 
I  had  a  central  idea;  and  I  desired  to  set  that  idea  forth 
with  such  simple  brevity  as  would  enable  the  reader  to 
grasp  it  and  to  follow  it.  I  go,  as  it  were,  before  a  Grand 
Jury  only.  I  do  not  pretend  in  any  one  instance  to  have 
proved  my  points;  I  am  satisfied  if  I  have  made  out  a  prima 
facie  case  for  further  enquiry. 

My  object  in  the  present  reconstructive  treatise  has 
therefore  been  merely  to  set  forth  in  as  short  a  form  as  was 
consistent  with  clearness  my  conception  of  the  steps  by 
which  mankind  arrived  at  its  idea  of  its  God.  I  have  not 
tried  to  produce  evidence  on  each  step  in  full;  I  have  only 
tried  to  lay  before  the  general  public  a  rough  sketch  of  a 


THIS  WORK  INTRODUCTORY. 


435 


psychological  rebuilding,  and  to  suggest  at  the  y  ime  time 
to  scholars  and  anthropologists  some  inkling  o  the  lines 
along  which  evidence  in  favour  of  my  propos''  1  reconstruc- 
tion is  likeliest  to  be  found.  This  book  is  thus  no  more 
than  a  summary  of  probabilities.  Should  it  succeed  in  at- 
tracting attention  and  arousing  interest  in  so  vast  and  fun- 
da'TiCiital  a  subject,  I  shall  hope  to  follow  it  up  by  others 
in  future,  in  which  the  various  component  elements  of  my 
theory  will  be  treated  in  detail,  and  original  authorities 
will  be  copiously  quoted  with  the  fullest  references.  As, 
however,  in  this  preliminary  outline  of  my  views  I  have 
dealt  with  few  save  well-known  facts,  and  relied  for  the 
most  part  upon  familiar  collocations  of  evidence,  I  have  not 
thought  it  necessary  to  encumber  my  pages  with  frequent 
and  pedantic  footnotes,  referring  to  the  passages  or  per- 
sons quoted.  The  scholar  will  know  well  enough  where 
to  look  for  the  proofs  he  needs,  while  the  general  reader 
can  only  judge  my  rough  foreshadowing  of  a  hypothesis 
according  as  he  is  impressed  by  its  verisimilitude  or  the 
contrary. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  this  avant-courier  of  a  reasoned 
system  fails  to  interest  the  public,  I  must  perforce  be  con- 
tent to  refrain  from  going  any  deeper  in  print  into  this  fas- 
cinating theme,  on  which  I  have  still  an  immense  number 
of  ideas  and  facts  which  I  desire  the  opportunity  of  pub- 
licly ventilating. 

I  wish  also  >  remark  before  I  close  that  I  do  not  hold 
dogmatically  to  the  whole  or  any  part  of  the  elaborate 
doctrine  here  tentatively  suggested.  I  have  changed  my 
own  mind  far  too  often,  with  regard  to  these  matters,  in 
the  course  of  my  personal  evolution,  ever  to  think  I  have 
reached  complete  finality.  Fifteen  or  twenty  years  ago, 
indeed,  I  was  rash  enough  to  think  I  had  come  to  anchor, 
when  I  first  read  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  sketch  of  the 
origin  of  religion  in  the  opening  volume  of  the  Principles 
of  Sociology.  Ten  or  twelve  years  since,  doubts  and  diffi- 
culties again  obtruded  themselves.     Six  years  ago,  once 


^1  i   'i  '  ■.>'•"/ 


I 


M-     f  ■' 


\,i^ 


436 


CONCLUSION. 


'f', 


,  I 


more,  when  The  Golden  Bough  appeared,  after  this  book 
had  been  planned  and  in  part  executed,  I  was  forced  to  go 
back  entirely  upon  many  cherished  former  opinions,  and 
to  reconsider  many  questions  which  I  had  fondly  ima- 
gined were  long  since  closed  for  me.  Since  that  time, 
new  lights  have  been  constantly  shed  upon  me  from  with- 
out, or  have  occurred  to  me  from  within:  and  I  humbly 
put  this  sketch  forward  now  for  what  it  may  be  worth, 
not  with  the  idea  that  I  have  by  any  means  fathomed  the 
whole  vast  truth,  but  in  the  faint  hope  that  I  may  perhaps 
have  looked  down  here  and  there  a  little  deeper  into  the 
profound  abysses  beneath  us  than  has  been  the  lot  of  most 
previous  investigators.  At  the  same  time,  I  need  hardly 
reiterate  my  sense  of  the  immense  obligations  under  which 
I  jie  to  not  a  few  among  them,  and  preeminently  to  Mr. 
Spencer,  Mr.  Frazer,  Mr.  Hartland,  and  Dr.  Tylor.  My 
only  claim  is  that  I  may  perhaps  have  set  forth  a  scheme 
of  reconstruction  which  further  evidence  will  possibly 
show  to  be  true  in  parts,  and  mistaken  in  others. 

On  the  other  hand,  by  strictly  confining  my  attention 
to  religious  features,  properly  so  called,  to  the  exclusion  of 
mythology,  ethics,  and  all  other  external  accretions  or  ac- 
cidents, I  trust  I  have  been  able  to  demonstrate  more 
clearly  than  has  hitherto  been  done  the  intimate  connexion 
which  alv/ays  exists  between  cults  in  general  and  the  wor- 
ship of  the  Dead  God,  natural  or  artificial.  Even  if  I 
have  not  quite  succeeded  in  inducing  the  believer  in  primi- 
tive animism  to  reconsider  his  prime  dogma  of  the  origin 
of  gods  from  all-pervading  spirits  (of  which  affiliation  I 
can  see  no  proof  in  the  evidence  before  us),  I  venture  to 
think  I  shall  at  any  rate  have  made  him  feel  that  Ancestor- 
Worship  and  the  Cult  of  the  Dead  God  have  played  a  far 
larger  and  deeper  part  than  he  has  hitherto  been  willing  to 
admit  in  the  genesis  of  the  religious  emotions.  Though  I 
may  not  have  raised  the  worship  of  the  Dead  Man  to  a  su- 
preme and  unique  place  in  the  god-making  process,  I  have 
at  least,  I  trust,  raised  it  to  a  position  of  higher  importance 


(  1 
i  i 


THE  THEORY  OF  ANIMISM. 


437 


than  it  has  hitherto  held,  even  since  the  pubHcation  of 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  epoch-making  researches.  I  be- 
lieve I  have  made  it  tolerably  clear  that  the  vast  mass  of 
existing  gods  or  divine  persons,  when  we  come  to  analyse 
them,  do  actually  turn  out  to  be  dead  and  deified  human 
beings.  In  short,  it  is  my  hope  that  I  have  rehabilitated 
Euhemerism. 

This  is  not  the  place,  at  the  very  end  of  so  long  a  dis- 
quisition, to  examine  the  theory  of  primitive  animism.  I 
would  therefore  only  say  briefly  here  that  I  do  not  deny 
the  actual  existence  of  that  profoundly  animistic  frame  of 
mind  which  Mr.  Im  Thurn  has  so  well  depicted  among  the 
Indians  of  Guiana;  nor  that  which  exists  among  the  Sa- 
moyeds  of  Siberia;  nor  that  which  meets  us  at  every  turn 
in  historical  accounts  of  the  old  Roman  religion.  I  am 
quite  ready  to  admit  that,  to  people  at  that  stage  of  re- 
ligious evolution,  the  world  seems  simply  thronged  with 
spirits  on  every  side,  each  of  whom  has  often  his  own  spe- 
cial functions  and  peculiar  prerogatives.  But  I  fail  to 
see  that  any  one  of  these  ideas  is  demonstrably  primitive. 
Most  often,  we  can  trace  ghosts,  spirits,  and  gods  to  par- 
ticular human  origins:  where  spirits  exist  in  abundance  and 
pervade  all  nature,  I  still  fail  to  understand  why  they  may 
not  be  referred  to  the  one  known  source  and  spring  of  all 
ghostly  beings.  It  is  abundantly  clear  that  no  distinction 
of  name  or  rite  habitually  demarcates  these  ubiquitous  and 
uncertain  spirits  at  large  from  those  domestic  gods  whose 
origin  is  perfectly  well  remembered  in  the  family  circle. 
I  make  bold  to  believe,  therefore,  that  in  every  such  case 
we  have  to  deal  with  unknown  and  generalised  ghosts, — 
with  ghosts  of  most  varying  degrees  of  antiquity.  If  any 
one  can  show  me  a  race  of  spirit-believers  who  do  not  wor- 
ship their  own  ancestral  spirits,  or  can  adduce  any  effective 
prime  differentia  between  the  spirit  that  was  once  a  living 
man,  and  the  spirit  that  never  was  human  at  all,  I  will 
gladly  hear  him.  Up  to  date,  however,  no  such  race  has 
been  pointed  out,  and  no  such  differentia  ever  posited. 


.-L 


;:ff 


i     y    .       }: 


^p 


438 


CONCLUSION. 


:  ,1  i< 


!   'I 


f ' 


'\i 


i' 


The  truth  is,  we  have  now  no  primitive  men  at  all.  Ex- 
isting men  are  the  descendants  of  people  who  have  had 
religions,  in  all  probability,  for  over  a  million  years.  The 
best  we  can  do,  therefore,  is  to  trace  what  gods  we  can  to 
their  original  source,  and  believe  that  the  rest  are  of 
similar  development.    And  whither  do  we  track  them  ? 

"  So  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  trace  back  the  origin  of 
the  best-known  minor  provincial  deities,"  says  Sir  Alfred 
Lyall,  speaking  of  India  in  general,  "  they  are  usually  men 
of  past  generations  who  have  earned  special  promotion 
and  brevet  rank  among  disembodied  ghosts.  ...  Of 
the  numerous  local  gods  known  to  have  been  living 
men,  by  far  the  greater  proportion  derive  from  the  ordi- 
nary canonisation  of  holy  personages.  .  .  .  The  num- 
ber of  shrines  thus  raised  in  Berar  alone  to  these  anchor- 
ites and  persons  deceased  in  the  odour  of  sanctity  is  large, 
and  it  is  constantly  increasing.  Some  of  them  have  al- 
ready attained  the  rank  of  temples."  We  have  seen  that 
an  acute  observer,  Erman,  came  to  a  similar  conclusion 
about  the  gods  of  those  very  Ostyaks  who  are  often 
quoted  as  typical  examples  of  primitive  animists.  Of  late 
years,  all  the  world  over,  numerous  unprejudiced  inves- 
tigators, like  Mr.  Duff  Macdonald  and  Captain  Hender- 
son, have  similarly  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  gods 
of  the  natives  among  whom  they  worked  were  all  of  hu- 
man origin;  while  we  know  that  some  whole  great  national 
creeds,  like  the  Shinto  of  Japan,  recognise  no  deities  at  all 
save  living  kings  and  dead  ancestral  spirits.  Under  these 
circumstances,  judging  the  unknown  by  the  known,  I  hesi- 
tate to  take  the  very  bold  step  of  positing  any  new  and 
fanciful  source  for  the  small  residuum  of  unresolved  gods 
whose  human  origin  is  less  certainly  known  to  us. 

In  one  word,  I  believe  that  corpse-worship  is  the  proto- 
plasm of  religion,  while  admitting  that  folk-lore  is  the  pro- 
toplasm of  mythology,  and  of  its  more  modern  and  philo- 
sophical offshoot,  theology. 


■  t , 


INDEX. 


Adonis,  river,  and  grave  of,  151 
Adonis-worship,  245,  312;  human 

sacrifice  in,  312;  rites  of,  313 
African  burial  rites,  29 
African  tribes,  religious  belief  of, 

25 
Africana,  iv 

Ainu,  The  Hairy,  135 
Alexander,  son  of  Philip,  6 
Alexandria,  the  Eastern  London, 

15;  state  of  religion  in,  368 
Allah,  isolation  of,  in  Mohamme- 
danism, 412 
American  cremationists,  early,  55 
Amon-Ra,  or  Zeus  Ammon,  6 
Ancestor- worship,   182  et  seq,;  in 

India,  33 
Animism,  theory  of,  437 
Anttoch,  the  Venice  of  its  time, 

365 
Art  in  primitive  Greece,  84 
Articles  of  faith,  fresh  additions 

to,  II 

Ashera,  135,  189 

Athanasius,  7 

Atonement,  doctrine  of,  347;  not  a 
primitive  idea,  347 

Attis,  worship  of,  313;  self-mutila- 
tion in,  313;  festival  of  the  cult 
of,  314;  parallelism  to  Indian 
usage,  314;  essentially  a  corn- 
god,  314  ,  ^       , 

Aubrey's  Remains  of  Genttltsme, 

139 
Aviella,  Goblet  d',  401 
Aztec  cannibal  banquets,  no 


B 


Baptism,  389,  405 
Barrows,  Long,  used  for  burials, 
55;  Round,  for  cremation,  56,65 
Bastian,  134,  139 


Baumkultus,  Mannhardt's,  138 
Beagle,  Voyage  of  the,  Darwin's, 

143 
Belief,  Egyptian,  summary  of,  178 
Blood,  substitute  for,  no 
Body,  resurrection  of  the,  43,  54, 

63 

Buddhism,  Freeman  on,  380 

Builder's  Rites  and  Ceremonies^ 
Speth's,  254 

Bull-god,  the  Hebrew,  191 

Bureau  of  Ethnology,  Report  of, 
106 

Burgon,  Dean,  418 

Burial,  cave,  53;  dissertation  on, 
55  ^/  seq.;  due  to  fear  of  ghosts, 
56;  earlier  than  burning,  54; 
Frazer  as  to,  56;  resurrection 
from  practice  of,  54;  rites,  Afri- 
can, 29;  sanctity  from,  sacred 
well,  152;  system,  origin  of  cul- 
tivation as  adjunct  of,  278 

Burrough,  Stephen  (in  Hakluyt), 
129 

Burton,  Sir  Richard,  416;  anec- 
dote of,  27 

"  Burying  the  carnival,"  338 

Busta,  66 


Cade,  Jack  (Mortimer),  259 
Camel    sacrifice,    333;   compared 
with  that  of  Potraj  and  Diony- 
sus, 333;  must  be  hastily  eaten. 
333;  compare  paschal  lamb,  333 
Cannibal  banquets,  Aztec,  no 
"  Carnival,  Burying  the,"  293 
Catlin,  50 
Cave  burial,  53 
Ceremonial  institution,  200 
Ceremonialism,    religious,  evolu- 
tion of,  go 
Ceremonies  for  expulsion  of  evils 
from  communities,  349 


'.•j 


'i 


i 


439 


I      I 


440 


INDEX. 


I' 

r. 


^^: 


lis,  -1 


.1 


Chalmers,  Mr.,  76,  358,  359 

Cheyne,  Professor,  on  stone-wor- 
ship, ISO 
tPhrist,  a  com-eod,  381;  a  king's 
son,  383;  and  Meriah,  292;  a  tem- 
porary king,  379;  bought  with  a 
price,  385 

Christendom,  corpse-worship  of, 
at  the  tomb  of  Christ,  417;  de- 
velopment of  God  of  ancient 
Hebrews  in  God  of  modern,  225; 
God  of,  459 

Christian    and    heathen     gods, 

^  apotheosis,  235;  basis  of  religion, 
226 

Christianisation  of  Megalithic 
monuments,  115 

Christianised  form  of  scapegoat, 
351 

Christianity,  a  blend  of  JudaisJi 
with  the  popular  religfions  of  the 
day,  363;  a  competitor  of  Gnos- 
ticism, 395 ;  a  magma  of  Mediter- 
ranean religious  ideas,  244;  as 
standard  of  reference,  3;  a 
syncretic  product.  363;  an  em- 
bodiment of  Mediterranean 
cults,  227;  Egyptian  influence 
on,  400  ei  seg.;  elements  of, 
404;  growth  of,  362;  in  the  West, 
403  et  seq.;  in  its  beginning 
oriental,  400;  least  anthropo- 
morphic creed,  18;  Mithraism  a 
competitor  of,  395;  modern  wor- 
ship of  dead  central  force  in, 
408;  origin  of,  author  guided  by 
Frazer  and  Mannhardt,  v;  pe- 
culiarities of,  17;  priesthood  not 
an  integral  part  of  early,  11; 
primitive,  three  great  motors  of, 
399;  reason  for  triumph  of,  389; 
religion,  typical,  15;  religion,  not 
a  typical,  17;  removed  from  all 
primitive  cults,  17;  specially  the 
religion  of  immortality,  392;  two 
main  forms  of,  403 

Christian  Pantheon,  7 

Christians  a  sect  of  the  Jews,  7 

Christus,  compared  with  Meriah, 
285 

Circumcision,  baptism  substituted 
for,  405 ;  origin  of,  200 

Clodd,  Mr.  Edward,  v,  21,  254 

Codrington,  Dr.,  132 

Conder,  Major,  196,  198, 199,  415 


Conway,  Sir  Martin,  175 

Cook,  Captain,  132 

Corn-god,  as  seed,  287;  Christ  a. 
381 

Corn-god  worship  and  Potraj  fes- 
tival, analogy  of,  304 

Corn-gods,  animal,  289;  substitute 
for  human  sacrifice,  289;  in  Eng- 
land, 2^,  291 

Corn  festivals,  European,  si6 

Cornish  well-spirits,  152 

Corpse,  preservation  of,  49;  value 
of  saintly,  as  treasure,  422;  wor- 
ship, at  Rome,  419;  in  Britain, 
427;  in  Islam,  413;  the  proto- 
plasm of  religion,  438 

Cremationists,  early  American, 
Mexicans,  55 

Cretan  Dionysus  myth,  307 

Cross,  threefold  value  of,  115 

Cultivation,  origin  of,  as  adjunct 
of  burial  system,  278;  paradox 
of.  273;  origin  of,  275 

Cultedu  Cypres,  Sur  le,  Lajard's, 
143 


D'Albertis,  68 

D'Alviella,  Goblet,  401 

Darwin's  Voyage  of  the  Beagle, 

143 

Dead,  book  of  the,  170;  cult  of  the, 
185,  433;  in  Egypt,  415;  fear  of, 
53;  immortality  the  basis  of 
worship  of,  412;  life  of,  42; 
spiritualist  belief  in,  42;  three 
stages  in  belief,  43;  reappear- 
ance in  sleep,  48;  Roman  com- 
memoration of,  431;  vo*'ve 
offerings  to,  158 

Dead  bodies,  preserving  and  wor- 
ship of,  68 

Dead  god,  worship  of,  universal 
in  cults,  436 

Dead  man's  tomb,  the  pi  lenitive 
temple.  11 

"  Death,  Carrying  out,"  293 

Death,  primitive  theories  as  to, 
45,  47;  the  gate  of  life,  162;  The 
Worship  of,  153,  198 

Deified  man,  worship  of,  3 

Deity,  the    need   of   a   familiar, 

432 
De  Ostride,  Plutarch's,  166 


III    i 


INDEX. 


441 


Deities,  Sir  Alfred  Lyall  on  origin 
of  minor  provincial,  438 

Dii  Manes,  9 

Dionysus,  originally  the  com  vic- 
tim, 307;  worship,  304, 305 ;  resur- 
rection of,  305;  varieties  of,  306; 
resemblance  between,  and  Po- 
traj  rites,  306 

Divine  victim,  priest  alone  drinks 
blood  of,  346;  trees  in  Semitic 
area,  149 

Divinity,  abnormal  conditions  of 
connection  with,  228 

Doubt  and  credulity  always  coex- 
istent, 396 

Du  Chaillu,  71 


E 


Easter  compared  with  other  an- 
nual festivals,  391 

'*  Eaten  with  honour,"  vii 

Egypt,  evolution  of  gods  in,  155. 
tombs  and  caves  of,  161,  416 

Egyptian  Belief,  summary  of,  178; 
gods  early  kings,  176;  bestial 
.types  of,  173,  175;  ophiolatry, 
Hebrew  snake  worship  parallel 
with,  192;  totems,  168;  triads  of 
God's  origin  of  Trinity,  17,  369 

Egyptians,  true  religion  of,  wor- 
ship of  the  dead,  and  polythe- 
ism, 179 

Elliot,  Sir  Walter,  30X 

Ellis,  68 

Emigrants,  Irish,  in  Canada,  cus- 
tom of,  343 

Erman,  on  gods  of  the  Ostyaks, 
438 

£ssqy  on  Scarabs,  Loftie's,  167 

Ethnology,  Report  of  Bureau  of, 
106;  in  Folklore,  Gomme's,  288, 
290 

Eucharist,  Mexican,  341 

Euhemerism,  16 

P 

Fairs,  gingerbread  cakes  at,  sig- 
nificance of,  344 
Faith,  fresh  additions  to  Articles 

of,  II 

"  Feeding  the  Dead,"  299 

Fetichism,  97 

Flagstone  of  the  kings,  113 


Folklore  the  protoplasm  of  myth- 
ology and  theology,  438 

Forbes,  H.  O.,  50.  69,  80,  128,  268 

Fortnightly  Review,  viii 

Frazer,  J.  G.,  v,  56,  87,  91,  138, 
142,  174.  175,  191.  328,  230,  231, 
232.  233,  235,  237,  238,  239,  241, 
242,  245,  246,  248,  252,  270,  279, 
280,  283,  286,  287,  288,  291,  294, 
297,  305.  306,  307,  309,  310,  312, 
314,  315,  316,  336,  338,  342,  344, 

348,349.350.352,353.355 
Freeman,  E.  A.,  on  Buddhism,  380 
Future  Life,  Hebrew  theories  as 

to,  184 


Galton,  Mr.,  146,  318 

Gentilisme,  Remains  of,  Aubrev's, 
139 

Ghost  theories,  159 

Giant's  dance,  107 

Gill,  Wyatt,  69,  329 

Gnosticism,  a  competitor  of  Chris- 
tianity, 395 

God,  boundary,  270;  corn-,  as  seed, 
287;  development  of  Holy  Ghost 
from,  407 ;  eating,  the,  339 ; 
feast,  sacraments  survival  from 
cannibal,  346;  growth  of  idea 
of,  19;  the  Hebrew  bull-,  191; 
human  origin  of,  ^;  of  Christen- 
dom, 409;  belief  in  personality 
of,  409;  as  represented  by  Ital- 
ian art,  409;  cannot  be  realised 
except  symbolically,  410;  of 
food,  making  of,  281;  manufac- 
tured, doctrine  of,  vi;  monothe- 
istic conception  of,  b.  c,  14;  of 
the  ancient  Hebrews,  develop- 
ment of,  into  God  of  modern 
Christendom,  225  ;  of  increase, 
Jahweh  a,  195;  peculiar  story 
of  evolution  of  God  of, 
180 ;  resembance  between 
the  mother  of,  and  the 
mother  of  the  gods,  385;  sacra- 
mental union  with  a,  322;  sacri- 
fice of,  in  atonement,  320;  the, 
as  bread  and  wine,  337;  the  He- 
brew.  154,  155;  worship,  devel- 
opment of  sentiment  from 
corpse-worship  to,  162;  Hebrew 
stone-,  187;  of  Egypt,  the,  viii; 


442 


INDEX. 


■i:,T^ 


m 


of  the  Ostyaks,  Erman  on,  436; 
origin  of  Egyptian  triads  of, 
369;  evolution  of,  407 

God-eating,  in  Mexico,  327  ei  seq.; 
sacraments,  evolution  of,  vi 

God-making,  orgiastic  festival  of 
Potraj.  301,  3251  346;  for  ships, 
263  ;  for  river,  264 ;  for  war, 
267 

Gods,  all  primitive,  corpses,  91; 
ancestors  as,  86;  artificial  crop 
of,  247;  bestial  types  of  Egyp- 
tian, 17^,  175;  Egyptian,  orig- 
inally kmgs,  155;  elemental,  or 
nature-gods,  176;  superadded 
factor  in  Egyptian  religion,  177; 
foundation,  258,  319;  framed 
from  abstrac  t  conceptions,  174; 
frequently  put  to  death  by  their 
votaries,  233 ;  §reat,  classes 
rather  than  individuals,  269; 
growth  of,  from  ghosts,  71,  72; 
growth  of,  spontaneous,  247; 
importance  of  antiquity  of,  in 
ancient  and  modern  society,  73, 
74;  in  Egypt,  evolution  of,  155 
killing  01,  a  component  of  mf.ny 
faiths,  234;  apotheosis,  heathen 
and  Christian,  235;  minor,  neces- 
sity of  renewing,  411;  new, 
necessary  in  religion,  432;  of 
agriculture,  272;  of  city  walls, 
251;  of  towns  and  villages,  255; 
Semitic,  vagueness  of,  205 

Golden  Bough,  The,  Frazer's,  v, 
87,  138,  142,  246,  280,  283,  297 

Gomara,  8i 

Gomme,  Lawrence,  v,  259,  288, 
290,  297,  303,  306,  311,  349 

Good  qualities,  eating,  323,  324 

Gould,  S.  Baring,  248 

Graves,  food  plants  on,  281 

Grave-stakes  and  standing-stones 
or  tombstones  as  objects  of 
worship,  82,  83 

Greece,  art  in  primitive,  84 

Greek  scapegoat,  352 

Grote,  on  Greek  worship,  103 

Grove,  sacred,  93 

H 

Haggard,  H.  Rider,  352 
Harranians,    infant     sacrifice 
among,  344 


Hartland,  Sidney  (note)  v,  6,  47, 

302,  324,  349.  388 
Harvest,  first-fruits  of,  299 
Hebrews,  development  of  God  of 
the  ancient,  into  Go<l  of  mod- 
ern    Christendom,    225;    stone 
frods,  187;  theories  as  to  future 
ife,  184 
Heathen   sacrifice   of  a    god  to 
himself  analogous  to  Christian 
sacrifice  of  the  mass,  244 
Henderson,  Captain,  438 
Hierurria,  Dr.  Rock's,  430 
Holy  GViost,  development  of,  from 

God,  407 
Holy  heads,    preservation   of   in 

Britain,  429 
Honorific     cannibalism,     Sidney 

Hartland  on,  324 
Horus,  Madonna  and  Child  corn- 
pa',  ed  with,  400 
Hu^h,  St.,  of  Lincoln,  379 
Huitzilopochtli,     image     of,     in 
c1'  igh,  eaten  by   worshippers, 

3-,  ' 
Hunter,  Sir  William,  31,  32,  143, 

144 


Idea  of  God,  growth  of,  19 
Idols,  loi  et  seq.,  mummy,  of  Mex- 
icans, 81,  82;  wooden-,  probable 
origin  of,  69;  origin  of,  79;  su- 
persession of  mummy  by,  80; 
wooden,  derived  from  sepulchre 
head  posts,  137 
Illustrated  London  News,  5, 56, 

74 

Images,  multiplication  of,  85 

Immortality,  from  practice  of 
burning,  54;  and  resurrection, 
viii;  of  the  soul,  43,  54;  the  basis 
of,  worship  of  dead,  412 

Incarnation,  theory  of,  229;  an  or- 
dinary feature  01  religion  in  the 
first  century,  233 

lona,  black  stones  of,  116 

Irish  well-spirits,  152 

Isis,  Madonna  and  Child  compar  d 
with,  400 

Israel,  evolution  of  God  of,  pecu- 
liar story  of,  180;  religion  of, 
originally  polytheistic,  201 

Italy,  shrines  of  saint,  in,  424 


INDEX. 


443 


J 

Jahweh,  ancestral  sacred  stone  of 
the  people  of  Israel,  126;  a  stone 
god,  197;  attempts  to  make,  al- 
ways incorporeal,  124;  destruc- 
tion of  stone,  m  ide  his  worship 
cosmopolitan,  222;  incorporeal 
Supreme  Ruler,  222;  disserta- 
tion on,  123  ei  seg.;  generic  con- 
ception of  pure  deity,  223  ; 
human  sacrifice  to,  199  ;  later 
conception  of,  211  ;  Molech- 
traits  of,  212;  the  value  of,  192 
et  seg.;  a  god  of  increase,  195; 
object  of  portable  size,  123;  spir- 
itualized into  great  national 
deity,  125;  th  j  Hebrew  god,  154, 
155;  the  Rock  of  Israel,  125; 
worship  of,  astrological  addi- 
tions to,  213 

Jameson's,  Mrs.,  Sacred  and  Le- 
gendary Art,  420 
Japanese  totem,  360 
esus,  earliest  believers  in,  244 
esus-cult,    development   of,   405 
et  seg. 

Jews,  Christians  a  sect  of,  7 ;  poly- 
theists,  181 

John  the  Baptist,  388 

Judaism,  Christianity  a  blend  of, 
with  the  popular  religions  of 
the  day,  363 


K 


Kaaba,  114,  1S6 

Kings  as  gods,  227;  as  priests,  87; 
gods,  evolution  of,  172 


Lajard's  Sur  le  Culte  du  Cypres, 

143 

Landa,  80 

Landor,  Walter  Savage,  135,  360 

Lang,  Andrew,  23,  108,  114,  171 
(note),  176 

Lares,  369 

Lectures  on  the  Religion  of  An- 
cient Egypt,  Renouf'p   156 

Legend  of  Perseus,   Hartland's, 

V 

Lenormant,  M.,  on  ancestorship, 
183 


Life  of  the  Dead,  Three  succes- 

sive  stages  in,  vi 
Livingstone,  Dr.,  147 
Loftie,  158,  167,  308,  401 
London  Stone,  258 
Longmans'"  Magazine,  258 
Lundonstone,  Henry  de,  258 
Lyall,  Sir  Alfred,  on  origin    of 

minor  provincial  deities,  438 

M 

Macdonald,    Duff,   iv,  24,  25,  27, 

29.    30,    73>  74.  77,  9(i,   I43.  247. 
438 

Madonna  and  Child,  compared 
with  Isis  and  Horus,  400 

Mania:,  344 

Man-god,  the  death  and  resurrec- 
tion of,  the  keynote  to  Asian 
and  African  religions,  246; 
types  of,  231 

Man-gods,  importance  to  welfare 
of  people  in  early  times,  237; 
necessity  of  killing  them  before 
their  powers  decayed,  239  et 
seg. 

Mannhardt,  138,  353 

Man's  two  halves,  46 

Manufactured  god,  doctrine  of,  vi 

Mariette,  M.,  162,  168 

Martyrdom,  271;  the  passion  for, 
of  early  Christians,  419 

Maspero,  M.,  159,160,  176 

Mass  developed  from  Agape 
feasts,  12 

Megalithic  monuments,  Christian- 
isation  of,  115 

Men,  metamorphosis  of,  into 
stones,  107 

Meriah,  323;  and  Christ,  285,  292 

Meriahs,  283,  284,  319 

Meteorological  phenomena,  primi- 
tive misconception  of,  20 

Mexican  cremationists,  early,  55; 
eucharist,  431 

Mexico,  god-eating  in,  327,  et  seg. 

Migration  of  Symbols,  The,  401 

Mithraism,  a  competitor  of  Chris- 
tianity, 395 

Mock-mayors,  295 

Mommsen,  Dr.,  v 

Monotheism,  origin  of,  154;  reli- 
gion reduced  to  central  element, 
223;  rise  of,  iv,  204 


T^s^ 


444 


INDEX. 


Monotheistic  conception  of  God, 

H.  c,  14 
Mother  of  the  gods,  and  mother 

of  God,  resemblance  between, 

385 

Miiller,  Max,  33 

Mulun^u,  25 

Mummification,  49 

Mummy,  idols  of  Mexicans,  81,  82, 
worship  in  Egypt,  157 

Mythology,  and  Religion,  relative 
positions  of,  20;  essentially  theo- 
retical, 23 

N 

Nature-worship,  origin  of,  v 
New   ideas   of   secondary   rank, 

enumeration  of,  vi 
Nordenskiold,  Baron,  357 


Obelisk,  origin  of.  105 

Oberammergau,  379 

Ohio  mounds,  55 

Osiris,  as  the  god  of  dead,  308, 
as  a  corn-goa,  309;  legend  of 
Busiris  concerning,  310;  festival 
resemblance  to  rites  of  Potraj, 
308;  festivals,  customs  at,  345; 
gfrowth  of  worship  of,  167; 
originally  a  king,  165;  rite,  con- 
temporary survival  of,  in  Egypt, 
310;  rite,  annual  human  victim 
of,  31X;  worship  of,  107 


Pandavas,  Five,  94,  109,  114 
Paris,  saints'  relics  in,  425 
Paul,  probably  first  preacher  of 
Christ  to  the  world  at  large,  387 
Paulicians,    accusation    against, 

343 
Penates,  370 
Petrie,  Flinders,  vii,  176 
Pharaoh,  divinity  of,  167 
Philosophers,  Roman,  compared 

with  Unitarians,  393 
Piacular  sacrificial  rites,  361,  356 
Pilatus,  Caius  Pontius,  3 
Plutarch's  De  Ostride,  166 
Polytheism,  origin  of,  Spencer's 

ghost  theory  as  to,  iv;  and  wor- 


ship of  the  dead  the  true  religion 
of  the  Egyptians,  179 

Potraj,  orgiastic  god-making  fes- 
tival of,  301,  325,  346 

Powell,  Professor  York,  v 

*'  Practical  Religion,"  viii 

Prevost,  Abb6,  45 

Priest,  development  of,  from 
temple  attendant,  89;  victim  and 
god,  identity  of,  320 

Priesthood,  dual  origin  of,  86;  in- 
dependent origin  of,  88;  not 
integral  part  of  early  Christian- 
ity, II 

Prophets,  enthusiasm  of,  219 


Ramsay,  Professor,  245,  313 

Reformation,  Progress  of,  in  Ire- 
land,  102 

Relics,  saintly,  necessary  for  the 
sacrifice  of  the  mass,  430 

Religion  and  mythology,  viii; 
should  be  separated,  40 

Religion,  and  mythology,  relative 
positions  of,  20;  as  a  result  of 
fear,  21;  Christian  basis  of,  226; 
connection  of,  with  death  never 
severed,  411;  demarcation  of, 
from  mythology,  vi;  Egyptian, 
based  on  ancestor-worship  and 
totemism,  157;  essentially  prac- 
tical, 22,  24;  every,  continues  to 
make  minor  gods,  410;  Roman, 
cosmopolitanised  under  the  Em- 
pire, 375;  Roman,  Hellenised, 
373;  Roman,  origin  and  growth 
of,  369;  solely  ceremony,  cus- 
tom, or  practice,  32;  state  of, 
in  Alexandria,  368;  worship 
and  sacrifice  prime  factors  of, 
40 

Religious,  belief  of  African  tribes, 
25;  ceremonialism,  evolution  of, 
90;  emotion  arises  from  re- 
gard for  the  dead,  411;  senti- 
ment, development  of,  from 
corpse-  to  God- worship,  162; 
thinking,  400;  main  schools  of, 
iii;  unrest,  description  of,  394 

Renouf,  Le  Page,  156, 159, 160, 172, 

Resurrection  from  practice  of 
burial,  54;  immortality  and,  viii; 


I!  I 


INDEX. 


445 


of  the  body,  43,  $4,  63;  steps  to 
provLMit,  57 

J\\;'rnafi/,  6a 

Rox  Nemoralis,  341 

Rhys,  Professor  John,  v 

Rotks,  Dr.,  Hierurgiat  430 

Rock,  Statulinu;,  108 

Roilcn,  Earl  of,  loa 

Roman,  Catholic  mass  a  survival 
iti  the  cult  of  Adonis-worship, 
345  ;  scapegoat,  35a;  ritual,  de- 
rivation of,  34  ;  scepticism,  392 

Rouji^^,  M.  de,  157 

Royal  victims,  sacrifice  of,  259, 
a6o 


Sacramental  meal,  first  step  to- 
ward,  3aa  ;  union  with  a  god, 

335 

Sacraments,  sacrifice  and,  31^; 
survival  from  cannibal  god- 
feast,  346 

Sacred  and  Legendary  Art,  Mrs. 
Jameson's,  420 

Sacred  books,  13 

Sacred  objects  of  the  world,  150, 

153 

"  Sacred  Stones,"  viii 

Sacred  Stones,93,  et  seq. ;  attempts 
to  Jehovise,  119,  lao  deriva- 
tion of,  from  tombs,  116;  in 
Britain,  113  ;  migration  of,  iii 

Sacred  trees,  138  ;  amo.  ^  f'hieni- 
cians  and  Canaataites,  150 

Sacred  well,  sanctity  from  *:(  .u7, 

151.  152 
Sacrifice,  and  sac  aijiis ,  3^!:' ; 
camel,  333;  cru»  ibal  n.;,  iti  , 
382  ;  child,  *o  mate  gods.'.r^  ; 
corn-gods sub'=t''.:t»-.  for  hu.i  ., 
289 ;  of  a  go'  ;n itH*  '^*^i>,¥  o|, 
320;  heathen,  ofagoci  :  :.  hitn- 
self  analogous  to  Christian  *»»  - 
rifice  of  the  mass,  244  ;  huni.tii. 
in  Adonis-worship,  312  ;  infant, 
amo.ig  Harranian-  344  ;  of  God 
in  atonen>ent,  3j«j  ;  of  royal 
victims,  219,  260;  piaciilar,  261, 
a6a;  propitiatory  annual  in  Nuw 
Guinea,  358 ;  sacramental,  in- 
volves renewal  of  divine  life, 
335  ;  Smith  Ro-bertson's  viuw  of, 
330 ;  theantbropic,  a6o ;  two 
kinds  of,  319 


Sacrificial,  animal,  usually  male, 
333  ;  victim,  sanctity  <>(,  331 

Saints,  intervention  ot,  in  Venice, 
4a3 ;  invocation  of,  9  ;  preser- 
vation of  relics  of,  in  Church  of 
Rome,  421  ;  relics  in  Paris,  425  ; 
devotion  at  the  shrines  of,  426  ; 
shrines  of,  in  Italy,  424 

Samoa,  Turner's,  99,  1 1 1 

Samoun  collection  of  Mr.  Turner. 

97 

"  Sawing  the  Old  Woman,"  294    i 

Sayce,  Professor,  33,  173 

Scapegoat,  belief  of  transference 
ot  evils  to,  349 ;  Christianised 
form  of,  351  ;  evolution  of,  350  ; 
human,  350  ;  Roman  and  Greek, 
352  ;  transition  from  human  to 
divine  animal,  354 

Scepticism,  Roman,  39a 

Schoolcraft,  50,  100 

Scone  stone,  112 

Seed-sowing,  origin  of,  as  adjunct 
of  burial  system,  278 

Self-sacrifice,  the  creed  of,  418 

Semiies,  Religion  0/  the,  119,  150, 
ai4 

Semitic,  gods,  vagueness  of,  205  ; 
stone-cult,  116 

Sepolture  dei  giganti,  94 

Simpson,  William,  v,  40,  74,  a7i, 
411,416 

Sin-eater,  ritual  of  the,  345 

Sins,  remission  of,  bloodshed  nec- 
essary for,  361 

Skull,  or  head,  importance  of, 
51,  66  ;  primitive  worship  of,  69, 
70 

Smith,  Angus,  101 

Smith,  Robertson,  iv,  21,  33,  91, 
117,  118,  136,  145,  152,  153,  185, 
189,  209,  214,  215,  255.  256.  260, 
262,  318,  320,  330,  355,  356,  373 

Smith's,  Robertson,  view  of  sacri- 
fice, 330 

Snako-worship,  Hebrew,  parallel 
with  Egyptian  ophiolaliy,  192 

Sociology,  Principles  of,  34,  68, 
74  (note),  99,  435 

Soul,  Frazer  and  the,  47  ;  Hart- 
land,  Sidney,  and  the,  47 ; 
immortality  of  the,  63  ;  separate, 

47 
Spahu,  Altbate,  loi 
Spencer,  Herbert,  iv,  23,  24,  31,  36, 


'If!  1 


1   ' 


f . 


446 


INDEX. 


fi. 


I    '  .' 


(        I 


47,  49.  50,  5a,  68,  70,  74,  76,  79. 
81,  82,  99,  no,  134,  146,  173,  174, 
200,  279,  418,  430,  435 

Speth,  254,  271 

Spirit-possessed  persons  in  rude 
society,  230 

Stake,  wooden,  93 

Slakes,  sacred,  137 ;  inferior  to 
stones,  137 ;  derivation  of,  138  ; 
wovship  of,  139 ;  evolution  into 
idol,  133 

Standard  of  reference,  Christianity 
as,  3 

Stahic,  definition  of,  349 

Statues,  an  outgrowth  of  tomb- 
stones, 83 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  authority  on 
memorial  tree-planting,  141 

St.  Hugh  of  Lincoln,  379 

Stick-worship,  100 

Stone-cult,  Semitic,  116 

Stone-gods,  Hebrew,  187 

Stonehenge,  yi,  112 

Stones,  sacrf  1,  93  et  sea.;  Sardin- 
ian, loi ;  of  the  Hebrews,  117 
et  seq.;  metamorphosis  of  men 
into,  107 

Stone  worship,  Professor  Cheyne 
on,  I30 

Sun-worship,  105 

Swinburne,  quoted,  18 

Symbolism,  never  primitive,  209 

Syrians,  easily  Hellenised,  366 


Taylor,  Dr.  Isaac,  83 

Temenos,  cenotaphs  if  not  tombs, 
148 

Temple,  origin  of,  74,  75,176  ;  pray- 
ing house,  origin  of,  69 ;  the 
tomb  as  a,  159 ;  tombs  of  Egypt, 
416 

•'  The  Gods  of  Egypt,"  viii 

"  The  Life  of  the  Dead,"  viii 

Theotokos,  9 

Theology  or  mythology  essentially 
theoretical,  23 

Thurn,  Im,  437 

Tombs,  of  the  kings,  142 ;  and 
caves  of  Egypt,  161 

Tombstones,  early,  95,  96 

Totem,  Japanese,  360 ;  rites  and 
feast  at  sacrifice  of,  360 

Totems,  Egyptian,  168 


Totem-worship,  165;  origin  of,  174, 

175 
Totnes  Times,  259 
Trees,    among   Phoenicians    and 

Canaanites,  sacred,     150 ;     in 

Semitic  area,  divine,  149 ;  offer- 
ing to,  143  ;  sacred,  138 
Trinity,  Egyptian  triads  of  gods, 

origin  of,  17,  369 ;  evolution  of, 

407 
Turner,  Mr.,  Samoan  collection  of, 

91,  97,  III 
Turner,  Rev.  George,  34, 108,  146, 

298 
Tylor,  Dr.,  23,  31,  47,  98,  99,  100, 

104,  no,  114,  131,  134,  144,  146, 

349,  271, 379 

U 

Universal  Review,  viii 
Unitarians,  Roman  philosophers 
compared  with,  393 


Venice,  intervention  of  saints  in, 

423 
Vesalius,  45 

Victims,  substituted,  353 
Village  Community,  L.  Gomme's 

259.  297 
Village  foundation,  ritual  of,  257 

W 

Ward,  Lester,  25 

Well,  sacred,  sanctity  from  burial, 
153 

Wells,  sacred,  151 

Well-spirits,  Cornish  and  Irish, 
152 

Wooden  idols,  probt  ble  origin  of, 
69 

Worship  of  Death,  The,  v,  75 

Worship,  Adonis,  245,  312  ;  an- 
cestor-, 182  et  seq.,  in  India,  32  ; 
and  sacrifice  prime  factors  of 
religion,  40  ;  corpse,  of  Christen- 
dom, at  the  tomb  of  Christ,  417; 
God,  development  of  sentiment 
from  corpse-worship  to,  162 ; 
grave-stakes  and  standing- 
stones  or  tombstones  as  object 
of,  82,  83  ;  Hebrew  snake,  paral- 


l 
\ 


: 


m^mmrnt^m^^rmi^ 


INDEX. 


lei  with  Egyptian  ophiolatry, 
192 ;  mummy,  in  Egypt,  157 ; 
Nature,  origin  of,  v ;  of  Attis, 
313 ;  of  corn-god  and  Potraj 
festival,  analogy  of,  304 ;  of 
dead  bodies,  68  ;  of  dead  god, 
universal  in  cults,  436  ;  of  deified 
man,  3 ;  of  dead  and  polytheism 
the  true  religion  of  the  Egyp- 
tians, 179  ;  of  Osiris,  growth  of, 
167;  of  sacred  stakes,  129  ;  of 
skull,  primitive,    69-70 ;     sun, 


447 


i 


105  ;  totem,  165  ;  origin  of,  174, 
175  ;  as  proven  by  monuments. 
167 

Worshippers,  image  of  Huitzilo. 
pochtli,  in  dough,  eaten  by,  340 

Y 

Yarilo,  funeral  of,  294 

Z 

Zeus  Ammon,  or  Amon  Ra,  6 


\ 


y^ 

1 

I 

i   ,         _l 

I!  I    '  I 


V    I 


!^ 


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individual,  distinct." 

The  Hon.  Andrew  D.  White,  ex-President  of  Cornell 
University:  "A  noble  contribution  to  the  history  of 
civilization,  and  valuable  not  only  to  students  of  Ger- 
man literature,  but  to  all  who  are  interested  in  the 
progress  of  our  race." 

The  Nation :  "The  range  of  vision  is  comprehen- 
sive, but  the  details  are  not  obscure.  The  splendid 
panorama  of  German  literature  is  spread  out  before 
us  from  the  first  outburst  of  heroic  song  in  the  dim 
days  of  the  migrations,  down  to  the  latest  disquieting 
productions  of  the  Berlin  school.  .  ,  The  frequent 
departures  from  the  orthodox  estimates  are  the  result 
of  the  new  view-point.  They  are  often  a  dutinct  ad- 
dition to  our  knowledge." 

Professor  Friedrich  Paulsen  of  the  University  of 
Berlin :  "  It  is  neither  a  dry  summary  nor  a  weari- 
some attempt  to  include  every  possible  fact.  .  .  It 
puts  the  reader  in  the  center  of  the  vital  movements  of 
the  time.  .  .  One  often  feels  as  if  the  authors  treated 
addressed  themselves  personally  to  him;  the  discourse 
coming  not  through  bygone  dead  books,  but  rather 
through  living  men." 

National  Observer  and  British  Review:  "Altogether 
the  best  book  of  its  kind  that  has  appeared  in  Ger- 
many, or  out  of  it,  for  a  very  long  time." 


HENRY  HOLT  &  CO.,  ^^SuTSS.'"* 


% 


Denri?  Dolt  d  CO/0  mew  JSoofts* 
Zbc  Italians  of  ^o^Das* 

By     RfiNfe    Bazin.     Translated    by   WILLIAM 

Marchant.     i2mo,  $1.25. 
An  account  first  of  the  people,  and  incidentally  of 

the    country,   industries,   economics,  scenery, 

literature,  and  opera. 

Some  Clue0tion0  of  Good  Bnglfsb. 

Examined  in  Controversies  with  Dr.  Fitz* 
EDWARD  Hall.  By  Ralph  O.  Williams, 
author  of  Our  Dictionaries  and  Other 
English  Language  Topics.    i2mo,    $1.75. 

"A  volume  of  practical  interest,  marked  throughout  by 
fairness  in  criticism."— /Vo/.  T.  M,  Hunt  of  Princtton, 
"  Bright  and  suggestive."— ^«;»>w  of  Reviews.  "  Invari- 
ably readable  and  abounds  in  curious  illustrations." — Outlook, 

;rbe  f  sland  of  Cuba. 

By  Lieut.  A.  S.  Rowan,  U.  S.  A.,  aad  Prof.  M. 

M.  Ramsay.     With  Maps,  Index,  and  Points 

of  International  Law.    2d  Edition.  i2mo,  $1.25. 

"  Excellent  and  timely,  a  clear  and  judicial  account  of  Cuba 

and  its  history."—  The  Dial,    "  Conveys  just  the  information 

needed  at  this  time."— Philadelphia  Times. 

tCeIepatbi2  anb  tbe  Subliminal  Self. 

By  Dr.  R.  Osgood  Mason.     Hypnotism,  Autom- 
atism, Dreams,  and  Phantasms.     With  frontis- 
piece.    2d  Edition.     i2mo,  $1.50. 
"  He  repudiates  the  idea  of  the  supernatural  altogether,  and 
in  this  he  is  in  accord  with  the  best  thought  of  the  day  .   .  . 
interesting  and  logical." — Boston  Transcript. 

Social  jforces  in  (German  Xiterature. 

By  Prof.  KUNO  Francke.  2d  Edition.  8vo, 
$2.00  net.    Has  been  translated  into  German. 

"  I  must  confess  that  I  have  not  read  any  other  History  of 
Literature  which  so  strongly  inclined  me  to  take  up  th« 
authors  myself.  It  is  neithera  dry  summary  nor  a  wearisome 
attempt  to  include  every  possible  fact,  nor  does  it  abound  in 
affected  literary  criticisms,  or  historic?.!  reflections  about  mat- 
ters of  course,  but  it  puts  the  reader  in  the  center  of  the  vital 
movements  of  the  time.  One  often  feels  as  though  the 
authors  treated  of  addressed  themselves  personally  to  him; 
the  discourse  coming  not  through  bygone  dead  books,  but 
rather  through  living  men." — Professor  Friedrich  Paulsen 
of  Berlin. 

International  SBimetalliem. 

By  Francis  A.  Walker,     -^d  Edition.    $1.25. 

_  "An  elaborate  study  of  bimetallism  from  the  first  bimetal- 
list  in  the  United  St.-»tes,  and  there  is  not  a  syllable  in  it  that 
is  favorable  to  the  free,  unlimited,  and  independent  coinage 
of  silver  by  the  United  Sl2t.\.e%." —Christian  Register. 


'■'•'vsmsmmimmi 


Third  Edition  of  a  Remarkable  New  Romance. 


By  E.  L.  VoYNiCH.    i2mo,  cloth.    $1.25. 

New  York  Tribune  :  "  He  shows  us  the  veritable  conspir- 
ator  of  history,  who  plotted  like  a  human  being  and  not  like 
an  operatic  bandit.  .  .  It  is  a  thrilling  book  and  absolutely 
sober.  .  .  'The  Gadfly'  is  an  original  and  impressive  being 
•  .  .  a  story  to  remember." 

New  York  Times :  "  Paradox  worked  up  with  intense 
dramatic  effect  is  the  salient  feature  of  '  The  Gadfly '.  .  . 
shows  a  wonderfully  strong  hand,  and  descriptive  powers 
which  are  rare  ...   a  very  remarkable  romance." 

TAe  Dial:  "One  of  the  most  interesting  phases  of 
the  history  of  Nineteenth  Century  Europe.  The  story  of  the 
Italian  revolutionary  movement  ...  is  full  of  such  inci- 
dents as  the  novelist  most  desires  .  .  .  this  novel  is  one  of 
the  strongest  of  the  year,  vivid  in  conception,  and  dramatic 
in  execution,  filled  with  intense  human  feeling,  and  worked 
up  to  a  tremendously  impressive  climax," 

TAe  Critic :  "An  historical  novel  permeated  with  a  deep 
religious  interest  in  which  from  first  to  last  the  story  is  dom- 
inant and  absorbing.  .  .  '  The  Gadfly '  is  a  figure  to  live  in 
the  imagination." 

The  New  York  Herald:  "An  exceptionally  clever  stor>, 
eminently  fresh  and  original.  The  author  has  a  capital  story 
to  tell,  and  he  tells  it  consummately  well.  .  .  The  beaten 
track  has  not  allured  him,  and  the  characters  to  whom  he 
introduces  us  are  not  such  .is  we  meet  in  everyday  novels. 
This  is  the  crowning  merit  of  this  book," 

The  Chap  Book :  "  Gives  the  reading  public  an  opportunity 
to  welcome  a  new  and  intense  writer  ...  a  profound  psycho- 
lo^cal  study  ...  a  powerful  climax.  Yet,  j-iowever  much 
the  imagination  be  used,  the  author  will  be  foi  .id  to  rise  be- 
yond 11:  the  scene  at  High  Mass  on  the  feast  of  Corpus  Christi 
oeing  one  of  the  most  powerful  in  English  fiction." 

The  Independent:  "  We  have  read  this  peculiar  romance 
with  breathless  interest ...  a  romance  of  revolutionary  ex- 
periences in  Italy;  lifelike,  stirring,  picturesque,  a  story  of 
passion,  sacrifice,  and  tragic  energy." 

The  Literary  World:  "A  powerful  and  picturesque 
story — a  canvas  glowing  with  color  and  life — the  few  striking 
characters  stand  out  in  firm,  resolute  outlines.  We  heartily 
commend  '  The  Gadfly.'  " 

The  Buffalo  Commercial :  ''  In  every  way  sharp,  thrilling, 
entertaining." 

The  Chicago  Post :  "A  powerful  story,  and,  unlike  others 
of  its  kind,  holds  the  reader  s  attention  strictly  to  the  end." 

The  Chicago  Times-Herald:  "'The  Gadfly'  is  a  tre- 
mendous story.  It  goes  on  like  a  whirlwind,  gathering  force 
as  it  rushes."  

HENRY  HOLT  &  CO.,  ^\7A^^ 


